The Economy of Online Crime

hdtv writes "You might call the thugs or thieves, but on their own closed forums and referral-only Web sites, they value honesty and reputation. Fortune magazine looks into the black market for stolen credit card numbers and identities. What's interesting is that so few of the criminals retrieve their information via breaking into online stores." From the article: "Gaffan says these credit card numbers and data are almost never obtained by criminals as a result of legitimate online card use. More often the fraudsters get them through offline credit card number thefts in places like restaurants, when computer tapes are stolen or lost, or using 'pharming' sites, which mimic a genuine bank site and dupe cardholders into entering precious private information. Another source of credit card data are the very common 'phishing' scams, in which an e-mail that looks like it's from a bank prompts someone to hand over personal data."

Comments

The Problem Is The Credit Card

[omegashenron]

I work at a b&b where we continually get reservations by people wanting to pay with a credit card. Our customers make their bookings over the phone, fax and even e-mail - to process a payment, all we need is the card number and expiry date. When a receipt is printed (from entering the numbers), it actually has the card details on it!

I have seen many people collect their receipts from us upon checkin and just throw them away, without any thought about the information contained. Anyone willing to stick their hand in the bin would be able to collect these numbers for themselves.

I often think a better credit card system would be to have a credit card number and require the use of a temporary code for a transaction to take place (similar to my online banking) where we have an electronic device which has a changing code, of course, this would only be practical for over the phone and website bookings rather than fax/e-mail (although fax/e-mail bookings are insecure now as e-mails may not be deleted from the system and fax's could be just thrown away with the numbers on them).