PORTLAND, Ore. - Here's a warning about a new way scammers are going after your credit card information - by getting it directly from you.

The last time you went to get your car serviced it probably cost you a chunk of money. This new scam banks on the notion that those getting their car serviced would love to get some of that money back.

"This was a scam where an individual called a merchant," said William Mitchell, president and CEO of Merchant Concepts, the Portland-based credit card processing company with an inside look at this scam. Its service is used to run legitimate transactions for the car-dealer customers hit in this most-recent scam.

The merchant in this case is a luxury car dealership in Beaverton. A scammer posed as an employee from Visa/Mastercard processing and told the dealership that its last two credit card transmissions didn't go through.

The scammer got the dealership to give him the authorization codes for those transactions, along with the customers' names, addresses and the last four digits of the customers' home phone number.

The scammer was then able to track down the customer and call them at home, posing as someone from the dealership. 

The scammer told the customer the dealership made a mistake and overcharged the customer for the car service they just received. In order to credit the customer, however, he said the dealership needed the customer's complete credit card information. 

Additionally, if the customer still has his or her original receipt, he can verify the authorization code printed on it.

"The customer was unsuspecting," Mitchell said. "They had no reason not to. They were in fact there, so in this case they said 'If you overran my card, I want the credit. So I'll  give you whatever information you need."

What was really of great concern to us is when the consumer got the call. The caller I.D. stated it was the dealership's name that was on the phone.

"So this scam artist had tapped into a system that allowed their phone to be received as that particular merchant," Mitchell said. This gave the customer additional confidence they were talking to someone from the dealership.

William Mitchell is the owner of the actual credit card processing company, Merchant Concepts. He said once the scam artist gets to this point, the damage is done.

"They have all your card data, they can go to town," Mitchell said. "You have no reason to think this is scam, so you don't close your card down."

We asked how the dealership knows it's not somebody on the inside.

"We thought of that as well too," Mitchell said. "They're pretty confident it was not on the inside, but again you never know." 

It's a reminder, Mitchell said, to never give out credit card information over the phone - unless you're the person who initiates the call.

Mitchell has been in this business for 13 years, and said he has seen a lot of scams come through. "Incredible scams," he said. "This is one of the top; this is one of the more calculated."

Mitchell said this is also a good reminder for small and large businesses as well - they should never give out their customer's credit card information to anyone. Legitimate credit card processors will never call a business asking for this kind of information.

In this case, the dealership was able to identify this as a scam in time. The impacted customers were contacted and credit cards were cancelled before fraudulant charges were able to hit their accounts.

But this may not be the last time for this type of scam. Greg Remensperger with the Oregon Automobile Dealers Association is warning dealerships across the state about this scheme.

"From our standpoint," Remensperger said, "it's a scary precedent."