The husband of my mum's friend had a phone call from the police last week to tell them their card company had alerted them to suspicous transactions on their card (about £500 worth). They went abroad a few weeks ago and they are 99% sure it was skimmed there. I'm not sure what the transactions were but I imagine they were foreign otherwise there wouldn't be an alert.

My boss's Barclaycard has been blocked a couple of times, once when he bought a Sony Vaio and some other things in Hong Kong and later on when he was living in Sydney. Major hassle to get it reactivated though!

Gareth