It's given me an interesting idea.
If we know the bank will refund through insurance than there's a second level fraud where the victim is in on it for a cut of the profits.
Essentially the theatrics of fraud is done and then victim is refunded by the bank and then secretly compensated by the "fraudster" for their participation.
I may be convinced of that kind of scam. Everyone wants to feel like they're outsmarting the system. There's so many unknowns. Will I get the partial compensation? Will the bank reimburse me? I don't know, but I can see myself doing it. That's a problem
Obviously, in hindsight the correct way to handle this is to call the bank yourself. The way the scam works is they spoof your bank's caller ID, and you get a standard "do you recognize this charge? Press YES if you recognize, NO if not".
When you type NO, you get a message stating "our fraud team will be reaching out to you momentarily to resolve this issue", followed immediately by a call from a very convincing "customer support" person, again coming in as a caller ID from your bank.
At this point, I made some "rookie" mistakes as I'd mentioned, but hindsight is 20/20 in these cases where they are trying to keep you on your toes.
I always thought there was an underserved market if scammers are just filtering for gullible people. So, about time to see more sophisticated scammers casting a broader net.
However, it is very sophisticated. They somehow managed to actually get a fraudulent charge on my card. When I got the spoofed message from "my bank", the first thing I did was log onto my legitimate account. Sure enough, there was a charge I did not recognize.
The rest was just a series of unfortunate "rookie" mistakes on my part. But the person who called me was highly professional, easily could have been a real customer support representative and spoke English perfectly with no accent.
They took the max, $5,000. My bank thankfully refunded it.