ID Thieves Target Smaller Businesses

wiredog writes, "The Washington Post writes about real-time credit-card theft from small merchants (registration required). An accompanying Security Fix blog commentary from Brian Krebs describes '...10 hours of lurking I did on a variety of underground chat and Web channels frequented by identity and credit card thieves. From that research, Security Fix confirmed recent data breaches at four online merchants that were unaware that hackers had broken into their databases until we contacted them.' Lesson: Don't buy online from the cheapest retailers. Guess where they are cutting costs to be the cheapest?" The article and blog commentary also cast doubt on the efficacy of online "hacker testing" services.

Comments

Re:Hmmm.

[gEvil (beta)]

If you're doing this you should make sure that you don't have any overdraft protection on your checking account.

Re:(registration or bugmenot required)?

[coolgeek]

and they have deep pockets

This is the most inaccurate idea thrown around about credit card companies. That they have plenty of money and that's how they just forgive various charges on your card when you complain or are defrauded. This is only half true, and that part is that they have plenty of money. Sure, they forgive charges to your cards all the time. But who pays for it? Does anyone really know? Well, any merchant knows that it is the merchant that pays for fraudulent and otherwise disputed charges. That, plus a $30-35 charge just like a returned check fee.

Sure the credit card companies have a clause if you only ship the goods to the billing address, have AVS verification, make sure the CSC matches, AND have a signature required for the delivery, they claim that they will eat the cost and not pass it on to the merchant. Aside from the fact that shipping only to the billing address will cause one to lose business, in actual experience, I have observed multiple instances of credit card companies claiming the signature was forged for one reason or another. The merchant has no recourse. There is no appeal process. The only recourse is to discontinue accepting transactions from a card vendor, or to accept fraud expenses as part of the cost of doing business, and adjust consumer prices accordingly.

And to think the article attempts to paint some shade of altruism on these crooks by saying they make a "donation" to charitable causes to verify the card is useable. These crooks are costing these organizations money for the returned charge fees.