A family came back from a dream holiday in South Africa to find they had been scammed of £35,000 on their credit card.
Tristan Walters, 36, noticed he was £35,000 out of pocket when he got back from a month-long trip with his wife Heather, 37, and their two children Billy, eight, and Phoebe, five.
The staggering bill appeared on his Sainsbury’s credit card statement and included one payment of nearly £14,000 on a stay in a luxury hotel they had never even visited.
Tristan Walters, 36, noticed he was £35,000 out of pocket when he got back from a month-long trip with his wife Heather, 37, and their two children Billy, eight, and Phoebe, five
The staggering bill appeared on his Sainsbury’s credit card statement and included one payment of nearly £14,000 on a stay in a luxury hotel they had never even visited
The family, of Barnstaple, Devon, suspect their card was cloned by someone at one of the hotels they stayed at.
Their card provider has launched an urgent investigation into what happened and told him it was the biggest amount stolen the company has ever seen.
Normally a transaction as large as £35,000 would be blocked by the credit card company for fear of suspicious activity.
Mr Walters said: ‘The first thing I saw was this enormous number – £35,000. I couldn’t believe it.
‘It was weird because there were a lot of random payments on there that we actually had made – things like flights for upcoming trips to Borneo and India.
‘But there were also a lot of charges for large amounts in the HluHluwe region of South Africa that definitely were not ours, although we had visited that area.
‘One was for as much as £13,700 and another was for more than £9,000 – it was all for luxury five-star hotels that we definitely had not stayed in.’
The father-of-two says he only ever uses his credit card to book flights and holiday accommodation and does not even have a pin number for it.
The family, of Barnstaple, Devon, suspect their card was cloned by someone at one of the hotels they stayed at
Their card provider has launched an urgent investigation into what happened and told him it was the biggest amount stolen the company has ever seen
He claims Sainsbury’s told him the card had been ‘skimmed’ – whereby someone steals your credit card details in order to replicate it.
Mr Walters added: ‘It was a very professional job, replicating credit cards is a tricky thing to do by all accounts.
‘Apparently all the payments were made via contactless payment as well, which seems very suspicious given the limits usually placed on those transactions.
‘We think someone from one of our hotels must have been in on it.’
Sainsbury’s branded the fraud a ‘record-breaker’, while Mr Walters said: ‘Our credit limit was nowhere near £35,000 – there has obviously been a massive mistake somewhere.
‘But this is the reason I make all of those payments on a credit card rather than a debit card – if we’d been using our debit card it would have been a very different story.’
Apart from the unwelcome surprise when they got home, Mr Walters said the trip was one of a lifetime and included seeing humpback whales in the ocean and lions hunt buffalos in the wild.
He added: ‘It was an epic trip and we spent almost a month travelling around places like Johannesburg and Kruger National Park. It was perfect.’
Jennifer Johnston-Watt, of Sainsbury’s Bank corporate affairs, said: ‘Sainsbury’s Bank has robust fraud management processes and our specialist team is currently investigating this.’