Thomas McLeod accidentally left his credit card at a toy store and it was picked up by a thief.
"Someone had purchased over $500 worth of fresh seafood at the market on my credit card," McLeod said.
He got the charges reversed, but the incident got him thinking about security.
"This is blatant fraud, something going on because I lost my card, but maybe there are other things I am missing and other things going on, that was about three months ago," McLeod said.
He started paying closer attention and that lead him to BillGuard.com, a unique new service that works at keeping your bills free from overcharges.
"BillGuard is the world's first bill monitoring service, that is capable of checking your bills for you and is able to find hidden fees and billing errors that are very hard for you to find as well as fraud that your bank missed," BillGuard spokesperson Yaron Samid said.
BillGuard does that by looking for complaints on the Internet -- the BBB, Twitter, complaint boards, anywhere, and then applying those complaints and concerns to your specific bill.
"A lot of unstructured data all over the web," Samid said. "We built technology that can actually turn that data into actionable knowledge that is used by our system to scan your credit card and debit card bill and identify charges on your bill that has been complained about by others on theirs."
That collective knowledge and BillGuard's inside information has helped McLeod. So far BillGuard found a reoccurring charge of $12 a month that he canceled and $40 in overcharges from his bank.
"$40 is $40, but there is also the joy of finding out there is something going on I didn't know about," McLeod said.
The service is free. In the future, phone bills will also be monitored and eventually with a premium service you will pay for, you won't even have to complain about over charges; BillGuard will take care of that too.
