Bay business' warning after hit by online storage scam

The Kollective was fraudulently charged €1.99 for six months.

The Kollective wants to make the local community aware of a "new" type of credit card fraud after they were charged more than $3 for Google storage for six months.

General manager Gordy Lockhart said he noticed the charge - for €1.99 - but could not figure out where it was from.

His bank couldn't figure it out either and they contacted Google who claimed to have fixed the problem.

However, it appeared Google didn't as payments kept going out.

Lockhart found an article online that pointed out the scam. He said criminals were trying to be more subtle by not bothering to steal "$10,000 [because that's] going to get [them] spotted".

"They buy low-value services, in this case, Google storage, and then sell on that service for half the cost.

"Rather than paying $4, they sell it for $2 and they get $2. But of course, do that times six million and you're doing quite well."

A spokeswoman for the non-profit online safety organisation Netsafe said this type of incident was complicated and difficult to categorise.

"Normally bogus credit card charges happen at the end of a scam," she said.

"The financial loss could come at the tail end of any scam including fake prizes, scam shopping sites, data breaches or account compromises where the scammer captures a credit card number.

"As we don't have the background to this particular scam, it is hard to categorise this scam.

Netsafe had received hundreds of reports of scams that led to bogus credit card charges but only a handful was from people impersonating Google.

"Those scams were about one-off charges for amounts larger than this, they were not about recurring charges."

Lockhart said his bank followed standard fraud protocol and would investigate the issue.

"The issue from my perspective [is] I wonder how many people haven't spotted $3.50 coming out of their account every month… that could be billions over the course of the planet.

"We need to be very conscious of the funds we spend because it's community money.

"Our concern at the Kollective was more about getting the word out there so that everybody else who might not know what that $3.52 on their CC was can get an indication and put a stop to it."

New Zealand Police have not received any reports about this type of scam, a spokeswoman told the Bay of Plenty Times.

However, if anyone falls victim to a scam or has information about suspicious activity, they are encouraged to contact the police on 105 to report it.