‘It wasn’t good;’ Family loses $3500 in Walmart scam

FLORIDA — A Florida family says they had $3500 taken from their bank account after a series of bizarre transactions with Walmart they didn’t recognize.

The Hardy family told Jeff Deal with our sister station WFTV in Florida that their debit card was hit with 15 different charges in less than five minutes.

They received a flood of alerts on their phone, each one detailing the unwarranted transactions.

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“One after another. And she said, you might want to look at the bank account, because I’m getting all these weird transactions,” Jason Hardy said.

All 15 transactions were done in a four-minute span on the Walmart website. According to Hardy, someone used their Wells Fargo Bank card to buy 60 nightstands.

“It wasn’t good, because you know, I can’t afford to be paying, you know, $3,500 for stuff that I didn’t buy,” Hardy said.

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The packages were shipped from Hong Kong and delivered to different addresses near his Deltona home.

Each package was a different weight, despite the model being the same on all of the nightstands.

“Some of them weighed less than one pound. One of them 0.2 pounds. The highest one I think was about 14 pounds,” Hardy said.

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Hardy told WFTV that Walmart removed $900 in charges immediately, and Wells Fargo returned the rest as a provisional credit, nearly $2500.

However, Wells Fargo took the money back and sent an email that said: “We concluded this is a dispute between you and the merchant.”

Walmart had directed him to deal with his bank.

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“When you find yourself in that no man’s land between the merchant and the financial institution, their reality is you just don’t have a lot of recourse,” James E. Lee, the Chief Operating Officer for the Identity Theft Resource Center said.

Lee said a good first step is challenging the transaction.

He also said that consumers have more protection using a credit card for online transactions as opposed to a debit or ATM card.

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It is unclear how the Hardy’s account was compromised, but they did have their debit card on file with Walmart to order groceries.

More and more cyber attacks on Financial institutions are occurring, according to Lee.

As for the mystery surrounding the bizarre package deliveries, Lee said that drug traffickers often use this strategy to import illegal substances into the US.

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“They’re being shipped in different quantities, different size boxes, that might look like it’s a legitimate item,” Lee said.

After he filed complaints with the Better Business Bureau and reached out to Walmart, Walmart sent him an email that acknowledged the transactions weren’t his, and the seller was removed from its site.

The email prompted Wells Fargo to return the $2500 after a fight that lasted more than two months.

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“[I’m] very frustrated, very frustrated because I did not make these purchases,” Hardy said.

Consumers are reminded that if their accounts become compromised, they should file a police report, report it on the FBI’s Internet Crime Website, and alert the Federal Trade Commission.

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