by Cris Trautner on August 14, 2020
Since April, we've had four people call us to say our name, Nebraska Book Source, was used in a charge on their credit card statement. The amount charged was around $50, and several of the people mentioned they thought it was for another item they had bought online, like a blow-up swimming pool.
One person was very kind to send me a photo of what the line item charge looked like:
When a business sets up a merchant account to process credit cards, it can choose whatever text it likes to identify the business name on statement lines. Even for legitimate businesses, the identifying text can be different than the name you might expect; for example, when you're working with a business that has a parent company and uses that name on the statement or when the business name is too long to fit easily into the character limit so it's garbled and not immediately recognizable.
It is unfortunate that this particular scammer has chosen our name for his or her scamming efforts.
The good news is the people I talked to were able to have the charges investigated by their credit card companies or banks and get them reversed, so no harm done. But it also required that their card be canceled and a new one issued, which I know from my own experience is a pain in the butt.
We've been considering rebranding and changing our name for a few years now so we could expand beyond just books related to Nebraska, and this incident has brought the idea back to the forefront of my thinking.
We are also in the process of redesigning our website on a different platform, which I expect to complete by the end of the year. We may roll out the rebrand at the same time as the website redesign, or we may wait. We've been Nebraska Book Source for a very long time, so this isn't a decision to take lightly.
If you discover a charge on your account that you don't think is legit and that has our name on it, please first contact your bank or credit card company to report it so they can start the process of reversing the charge and issuing you a new card. Then please let me know: cris@infusion.media or (402) 477-2065. We're keeping track of these incidents in case it's helpful for law enforcement.
—Cris Trautner