Phantom Withdrawals
From Phantom
"Your bank statement arrives in the post, and you find a thousand pounds missing. Someone has been making ATM withdrawals using your card and your PIN. Yet your card wasn't stolen, you've told no-one your PIN, and you're careful to make sure you're not watched as you type it in. If this sounds like you, your dispute is a phantom withdrawal, and this website is designed to help you."
Phantom Withdrawal Resources
| Your questions about phantom withdrawals answered. A good starting point to get up to speed. Read this section to find out what a phantom withdrawal is, what criteria are used to document them on this site, and where you should start if you are involved in a dispute. | |
| A detailed list of phantom withdrawal cases, submitted and tracked by this site. View the list to compare your experiences with those described by others, or to research past cases of particular significance. | |
| Submit your case history, discuss your phantom withdrawal experiences with other visitors to the site, submit links to news and incidents from around, or ask about the technical weaknesses which are sometimes behind the withdrawals. | |
| Phantom withdrawals and other banking card payments security issues in the news. Follow links from here to find out what the latest vulnerabilities are, what the crooks are getting hauled in for, and what new security measures banks are deploying to protect you. | |
| Contact the maintainer of this site, to describe a case in detail, or if you have specific questions not answered here. Feedback from any sort of visitor is very welcome. | |
| Read this section to find out about research that has been undertaken into banking security, revealing existing vulnerabilities and future hypothetical vulnerabilities, some of which may explain certain phantom withdrawals. Also read about proposals for new security mechanisms and improvements to banking security to counteract these problems. | |
| Find links in this section to technical information about the functioning of ATMs and bank computer systems, in order to understand how card payments and ATM withdrawals work, and the technical nuts and bolts that it can help to understand when engaging in a dispute. |
Support this Site
Spam Problems: Inevitably once a site has been listed on Google for a while, the spam starts to come. I've protected some extra pages preventing modification but I will shortly be looking out for a good solution to limit the impact of bots without requiring casual users to login.
http://www.phantomwithdrawals.com has been run for five years or so as a static website, but since July 2008 has become a Wiki, enabling other researchers, industry representatives, and the general public to add their cases, and edit or improve the information on the site.
This has been possible thanks to the kind donations of two phantom withdrawal victims, who donated money towards the upkeep of the website. Thanks very much!
If you found the information on this site useful you can support it in two ways:
- donate small amounts of money to the maintainer (go to the Contact Information page)
- update, edit and improve the information on the site yourself. The wikipedia tutorial may be a good place to start learning about how to edit Wikis.
