Sometimes I wonder whether the banks are really bothered about their customers being defrauded.

During the last few months we have seen a near 200% increase in the amount of credit card fraud on my website at seatonelectronics.co.uk, so I thought rather than just delete the transaction as we usually do, I'll try to get this fraudster caught. After all the card was based in the USA, the IP address that was used to place the order was in Ghana, but most importantly of all the fraudster gave me a UK postal address where he or his accomplice was waiting to receive his new MP3 player.

So all we have to do is contact the bank to confirm that the transaction is fraudulent and then contact the police with the details of the order to have a plain clothes police officer go around to the delivery address in a white van with a small, plain, empty cardboard box. As soon as the 'delivery' is signed for the officer should be able to arrest the person receiving the parcel and search the house for all the other stuff that has been fraudulently delivered this week.

So first to contact our merchant account bank to report the fraud to them and get them to confirm that the transaction is fraudulent. I look in the welcome pack from the bank, one of the big four by the way. There's a telephone number for technical support, there's one for new business, and one for customer services, but no phone numbers for reporting fraud.

So I try their website, all the same numbers but nothing for reporting suspect transactions. There's a link called 'Combating Fraud' so I try clicking on that. Lots of common sense tips such as to check the delivery address against the cardholders address and a note on page page saying 'If you suspect a transaction is fraudulent you can decline the transaction' but still nothing for reporting a suspect transaction.

The only thing I can do now is to contact customer services and see if they can do anything about it. I phone customer services, who answer on the second ring, and explain that I wish to report a suspect transaction and am told of the number for the banks 'Fraud Hotline'. 'Great', I think, 'Now we're getting somewhere, A quick call to this line should get some results.'

I phone the number and find it's engaged. I expect you can guess the rest of this true story. That's right, I phoned three more times but each time the line was engaged. I feel like I should go back to customer services and ask if there are problems on this line, but my suspicion by now is that this number is not really advertised so there can't be many people phoning it. So it's probably just left off the hook so the bank can get on with its more important job of making more money by signing up more retailers.