Credit Card Fraud - Part II

By Michael Russell

In this issue of our series on credit card fraud we're going to dig a little deeper into some facts and figures that will most certainly raise the hair on the back of your neck.

In plain dollars and cents, a single credit card fraud can, and has, accounted for about forty-million dollars in just one year alone. That translates to about 900,000 victims in 22 countries. That's a lot of people and a lot of money and that's just ONE fraud. For those wondering, this particular fraud involved adult web sites, but credit card fraud was going on long before the Internet came to be.

What IS new is the ability to run this fraud across the entire world with just a mouse click and attack thousands of people in a very short period of time. The Internet has simply given a very old scam new legs. It has brutally exposed the security problems with our credit card system and takes advantage of these leaks to the max.

The particular fraud mentioned up top was perpetrated by a company called J K Publications. If you want to read about the details of this fraud you can do so in the August 1999 issue of Scientific American. Needless to say, it is some juicy reading.

So just where does the money go when a company or merchant or even individual perpetrates a credit card fraud? Well, if the fraud goes undetected in most cases the money goes to the merchant himself with the middle man, if there is one, usually getting paid a cut, if for no other reason than to make sure he keeps his mouth shut. In some cases the money goes to the merchant and the bank. Yes, there are some crooked banks out there, especially overseas in countries that will remain nameless for fear of gun toting gangsters being sent over here to settle a score.

If, however, the fraud IS detected then the money does get repaid to the victim but in most cases less than the under $50 amount that the banks have to pay. In other words, the victim doesn't completely come away from this unscathed. Many European banks won't pay up at all. As for the merchant account, they don't want to suffer losses, so many times they will simply just close up and reopen under a new name.

Because the system itself is weak, the thieves themselves are rarely caught, and then when they are, they rarely get punished to the extent that they should. The problem with the system is that is was designed for buying physical goods with the card holder being physically present. With Internet transactions the cardholder no longer has to sign for the transaction, at least not in the usual way, and this makes it way too easy to cheat the system.

In our next article in this series we'll look more into the problems of the system and what victims of fraud can do to help protect themselves, or for that matter prevent themselves from being the victim of credit card fraud.

Michael Russell

Your Independent guide to Credit Cards

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