Not where you would expect.
We've watched this with particular interest over the past 3 years because it affects us
so greatly. Many people are still afraid to use the internet because of the fear that
using a credit card online is unsafe, and with all the stolen cards being used on the internet
it is easy to understand why they have jumped to this conclusion.
What surprises us and surprises most people who pay attention to the news is that
the vast majority of reported stolen cards numbers are not coming from online merchants, but rather
from security breaches at the credit card processors, credit card companies, and government agencies.
These are the people that you would expect to have the best and most secure practices in place
and they are the source of millions of compromised card numbers.
On top of that, there are rings of credit card fraudsters collecting credit card numbers and personal information
at brick and mortor businesses (maybe your local gas station, curb market, and major retail outlet), and their stolen numbers make it to the internet crime rings to be circulated and
sold to other criminals where they are eventually used online. And finally, yes hackers are constantly working to
gain access to credit card information, and in some cases they are very organized rings of professional hackers.
Am I being hit by professionals?
As much as these crooks might want to think they are professionals, for the most part they are not. They have
found something interesting to do with their time and are just occupying their time by seeing if the stolen cards
they find on the internet can really be used for something. But don't underestimate them because their lack at any
particular skill does not diminish their ability to annoy and harm legitimate businesses. Almost nothing can be
worse for you than a teenager who has just discovered the world of stolen credit cards, and is willing to spend
10 or more hours a day seeing what he/she can get away with.
Learn more...
This topic should be very interesting to anyone with an online store and merchant account. Stopping the use
of stolen credit cards, preventing chargebacks, and improving efficiency are just as important as creating sales. When
one chargeback can cost you as much as the profit you make on 10 sales, you can't ignore the problem and hope it
goes away. That is a recipe for disaster. If you monitor your sales manually to look for suspicious sales, great!. If you
have an in house fraud prevention system, excellent. If you use FraudSmack, hooray! Just don't ignore it
and keep up to date on what is going on. We highly recommend that you join
http://www.merchant911.org/, which is community of online
merchants helping each other.