Headed off to to Sainsbury’s this morning to do our weekly food shop. On the way, Mrs_n mentioned she’d had received an email earlier in the week thanking us for spending 17,000 Nectar points at the store in North Cheam. As she’d thought it was a scam email (and we don’t live anywhere near North Cheam) she ignored it. I’d heard about issues with Nectar points being stolen on Radio 4’s ‘You and Yours’, so thought I’d better check our receipt once we done the shop just incase…
Turns out the email was the real deal and £85 worth of points had been spent. Not a massive amount of money, but irritating nonetheless. Phoned Nectar and reported that we’d not used the points, so they’ve cancelled the account and will open a new one for us and restore the lost points. All good.
Googling around it seems to be quite common with Nectar. It appears that the lack of security or authentication for Nectar cards, means criminals can theoretically duplicate a card’s bar code and there seems to be legitimate card details being circulated on the dark web. Similarly, there is no cap on the amount of points that can be spent at any given time or authentication needed. We now know that you can use a feature called ‘Spend Lock’ in the Nectar app, allowing the primary card holder to lock their Nectar points to prevent them from being spent without permission.
Anyway, if you use a Nectar card to collect points, it’s worth checking for any suspicious activity and enable the ‘Spend !ock’. Something we’ll be doing once we get our new Nectar cards.
