1st Art Gallery Credit Card Skimmimg Scam Tel Aviv Internet

I bought a very average painting online from 1st Art Gallery, I couldn’t be bothered to ship it back as they said I would have to pay for all shipping costs. The strange thing is a month later I received a charge of $89 from a restaurant in Tel Aviv on my statement, I’ve never been to Israel so was shocked to see it there. I challenged it with my card company who asked if I had made any overseas card payments in the previous month and the only one I had made was to 1st Art Gallery. So I went back to check their site and on their site they say:

‘We are committed to protecting your information. We take all credit card transactions via a secured, bank-authorized credit card processing company and through a 256 bit SSL encrypted and secured web page. No person will see your credit card information as it is all done electronically. We also do not keep your credit card number on file.’

I then rechecked their payment system and it was DEFINITELY not on a secure server, in fact instead of being transferred to a bank’s secure server, 1^st Art Gallery ask you to enter you card details on their unsecured page, you know it’s unsecured because the web address is http rather than htpps (the s is for secured) and no padlock icon appears in the bottom right-hand corner as it does for a secured page (see screenshot). So they can see and skim all your card data and then use this information to make false charges against your card.

Through reading other reviews on this site, it seems that 1^st Art Gallery is in fact located in Israel so it all fits. Don’t enter you card details on this site, it is not SAFE.