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Visa and MasterCard Take Fight To Scammers
An anonymous reader writes "In his latest story, Brian Krebs reports on a collaboration between brand holders and credit card companies to shut down payment processing for rogue online pharmacies, pirate software sellers and fake anti-virus scams. By conducting test purchases, they map out which banks are being used to accept payments for which scams. Writes Krebs, 'Following the money trail showed that a majority of the purchases were processed by just 12 banks in a handful of countries, including Azerbaijan, China, Georgia, Latvia, and Mauritius.' These results are then fed to Visa and Mastercard who typically shut down the merchant accounts 'within one month after a complaint was lodged.' If you can't accept payments, you can't make money — and without money you can't pay the spammers who advertise your product. This effort is apparently quite effective and has led to much concern by those running such sites."
I order some prescriptions on the internet from a pharmacy based in Vanatu, because it's tons cheaper from them even with health insurance. Are they cracking down on those sites?
This is wonderful, and exactly what should be happening. I have to ask why they didn't start doing this 20 years ago, though....
Tom Geller
Wow, they finally discovered the concept of "follow the money".
Better known as 318230.
that we're shutting down scams and such, but it's interesting to think about some of the side effects of all this computing horse power and the general increase in productivity it entails. Basically, these are criminals living on the fringes, and with modern statistical analysis getting so easy (because you can crunch massive amounts of data on the cheap) we're going to start really squeezing those people. There are millions and millions of people in this class. Some are criminals (like these) and some are honest people who used to get by on waste product and over production. If you live in the States and are over 30 you probably remember bags of Halloween candy for 50 cents. You don't find them any more because they've crunched the numbers and figured out exactly how much candy to order so they don't come up short. Best you'll see if 50% off and a weak selection.
It's like that everywhere in society. It's going to be interesting (and scary) to see what happens as we squeeze these people more and more. Most countries are moving towards Austerity and 19th century style 'Invisible Hand' economics so we're not just going to hand them food. Roving bands of bandits, anyone?
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I'm sure everyone will yell "hip hip, horray!" to this, but it's bad for reasons that aren't obvious. When you have a financial network which has more or less a monopoly on electronic transactions making decisions about who can and cannot make transactions based on arbitrary criterion, the door is opened wide for abuse. Look at Wikileaks: They weren't "scammers", but Visa and Mastercard shut them down. PayPal has a long string of broken businesses and bankrupt individuals under its belt for indefinately seizing/freezing accounts based on suspicions. I'm not going to make a slippery-slope argument here, because it can only slope so far before it cuts into profit margins and such so much a competitor steps in to fill the void -- but we are tolerating a certain level of misuse of power whenever this is allowed.
It's like the internet: Most everyone on slashdot believes in network neutrality, that is, service providers shouldn't prioritize or limit traffic based on content. The same arguments apply towards financial providers, but look around on this thread: Everyone is cheering.
Actually, I lied. I will use a slippery slope argument... amply supported by history. People would cheer censorship of images of pedophilia. Or rape, etc. And as the human history has long shown -- once a service provider also steps into a gate keeper role, they will find more reasons. Soon, it has policies about racism, sexism, communism... and the list grows ever longer. Just like, say, strict liability in criminal cases... once upon a time, it was only used to prosecute in cases where intent simply couldn't be proved easily (if at all), but gradually, over time... it expanded and corrupted itself, so now people face stiffer sentences and fines for downloading music than manslaughter.
Anytime a service provider takes on the gate keeper role, even with the most noble of intentions, eventually it perverts and corrupts... it wears away until the decisions become arbitrary, and the rules cease to matter. Today, it's scammers... tomorrow, someone else will be added to the list. And then another. And another.
But something has to be done! the audience cries. Yes, I agree. Fraud is a crime in most jurisdictions worldwide. The rule of law means the government, not the service provider, says who is punished and how. This is a step backwards -- a step into vigilantism and away from civilization. It is of the most noble intentions, but it is still uncivilized. The proper authority is the government(s). Trials, judges, lawyers, a presentation of evidence, impartiality -- these things matter. Yes, even on the internet. Yes, even when it's scammers. Especially when it's scammers.
To advocate for the rule of law and justice, for civil rights, often requires we defend the worst of humanity. I step in here to defend the scammers, whom are of exceedingly low opinion on this forum, to protect everyone else. Stop it here, now. Do not support this action -- while in this one instance it may be the instrument of good, it is the traditional method by which free society is destroyed. Demand accountability, but demand it of the proper authorities, not the private individuals and corporations.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
So, when will they cut off the IMF, World Bank, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and the Federal Reserve, and all the European Banks that robbed their respective countries?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
they won't bother rounding them up unless their inconveniencing the people that matter ($250k+/yr income last I checked). And strangely the real poor keep their misery to themselves anywhere I've ever lived. Right now I'm living in a ridiculously expensive part of town because I happened to have landed a nice job, but You can drive 10 miles from my apartment and find terrifying slums. The rich like to keep poor people close by to serve them, after all. But the funny thing is the poor don't spill out. That's mostly our drug policy. If you're poor you or someone you know is probably taking illegal drugs to cope with the stress of poverty, and the harsh (selectively enforced) drug laws let us keep the poor in their place. You'll notice the big push is for medical marijuana, not to legalize it. That's because it lets the rich have their weed and keep using the laws to oppress. We did it with the Chinese and opium.
Anyway, you'll still have roving bands of bandits unless you're in the 10%.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
So - the scammers are in business for 4-6 months on average before they come up on someone's radar for investigation. The investigation and following the money trail takes at least a month - maybe two. File a complaint, and voila - a month later, Visa and MC are shuttting down the scammer's merchant account.
Well - guess what? Most fraudsters shut down their operations and start a new one every 6 months on average. So - if it takes you 6-9 months to find and shut down their merchant account, you haven't accomplished anything really. They already made all the money they were planning to, and have already set up their next site and account. And, since there is almost zero capital investment required to set up a bogus payment website, these guys are making almost 100% pure profit for the time period that they had originally intended to. Also, they are re-sellling all the credit cards they process, and making money on the back-end.
Solution, meet thy problem:
$50k reward for best way to stop robocalls
CAPTCHA: screwed
Credit card companies are IN on this.
Remember that credit cards earn money by charging transaction fees against merchants?
All money funneled to a scammer through a credit card, credit card issuers are getting a cut of it.
Well. Actually I doubt that. ONE FRELLING MONTH.
Given the fact that the average spam / scam site relocates to a new URL in no time, how hard can it be to change bank accounts every two weeks?
Privacy is terrorism.
I'm not at all comfortable with credit card companies making unilateral and largely black-box decisions like this. While it's true that having a Visa account is not a right, I'm expect them to provide services without making such decisions for me. I feel as if I have more to worry from Visa than I have from the people they claim are selling shady goods.
Seems to me there is a really easy answer - issue lots of "booby trapped" dummy but valid CC numbers to lots of people to use whenever they get any sort of scam solicitation. When those numbers hit the payments system, it sets off an alarm and traces to whoever is trying to take payment, and notifies local Law enforcement.
I can see opportunities for abuse here. Your competitor offers a better product. You file a complaint that they are a 'pirate' and the credit card companies shut them down.
Have gnu, will travel.
those cheap calories keep hunger pains in check. As a human you still need around 2000+ calories a day. If all you can afford is junk your body knows it. One of the reasons for obesity that people like to ignore is that if you're constantly eating low, low quality food your body keeps sending you hunger signals. That's because you're not getting the nutrients you need, your body knows it, and it's telling you to get out there and find it.
:(. We have a presidential candidate who argues that you're not entitled to food, shelter and health care and that's not even an issue, let alone something hurting him in the polls. As a nation we've got a major guilt complex going on or something...
As for 'how do we fix it'?. I can't think of any way that doesn't involve some form of socialism. The productivity gains of the last 20 years mean there really isn't enough work to go around. Less that 1% of our population produces all the food we need. Robots and computers are automating manufacturing, etc, etc. But in America at least socialism has to be sneaked in. Ayn Rand was penniless in her old age and had to be convinced to take social security so she wouldn't die homeless on the street...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
just pointing out that these people aren't going to roll over and die just because their livelihood is taken away, and that we don't really have an alternative for them. So when you've got a whole bunch of criminals that have nothing to lose and no hope you're likely to see large scale violence, and unless you can afford a walled community and private security you're going to suffer for it. Maybe you can afford those things and you're not concerned, but I'm a little worried....
To address your comment directly, The law doesn't need to account for every possibility, but society at large needs to. We need to step away from principles and ideas and ask how the world really works. Principles and ideas are fun toys when you're in college, but if you hang on to them too tightly you'll find that you lose to the people who have no principles and are effectively exploiting your.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Can't they do this with Rachel from Card Member Services?
Tell the big pharmas they can make more money by eliminating this *cough* competition.
Let them go after the spammers.
Better still. Let the pharmas outsource that to the terrorists of music industry.
They REALLY know how to deal with the internet.
Or at least how to demolish it.
And spam is a part of the internet I would LOVE to see demolished.
Privacy is terrorism.
ACTA started out as a legitimate anti-counterfeit-goods agreement, that the MAFIAA hijacked. The stink of the MAFIAA corruption was enough to get ACTA rejected in its entirety. If Big Pharma can do without ACTA, that's one less lobby group pushing for its re-incarnation.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Finally we will get rid of scamers
support us by liking our page and using one of the covers on the site
http://fbookcouverture.com
there are large sections where the police don't go. Also, my brother's apartment was robbed in 2000 and they took everything. They caught the guy, and let him go. As for how well armed they are, that's not what's at issue. What matters is a) how desperate and b) how many. I don't want to live in the sorta place were suicide bombs are a part of everyday life, and they gun strapped to your leg won't keep your parts together when one goes off next to you and yours...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1921696&cid=34646738 ..too lazy to log in
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by IronClad (114176) on Wednesday December 22 2010, @06:32PM (#34646738) Homepage
Applying this to pirate content is kind of lame, since payments aren't what drives that. BUT I've always thought the Visa+Mastercard collectively have always had the power to end 90% of all spam, and could do it in a matter of weeks.
All it would take is:
1) terms of service forbidding UCE for products.
2) a few effectively placed honeypot/canary accounts
3) a couple tiger teams to place orders for the products that get spammed, and
4) kick the plug on the commercial accounts that deposit the money.
I would venture to guess that the financial services sector spends more overall on anti-spam/excess bandwidth/malware removal for their own infrastructure than they make from those few stinking transactions
Visa and Mastercard participate in or at very least facilitate these transactions. You are uncomfortable with someone choosing not to participate in criminal activity? They should knowingly facilitate fraud, allowing their networks to be used for criminal activity? No, I think the card associations and issuers are doing exactly the right thing in refusing to process fraudulent charges for counterfeight goods. Their motivation is threefold. Doing the right thing, of course, and branding, but mainly chargebacks. You may know Visa and Mastercard, through their issuers, guarantee to protect their customers from most types of fraud. If you pay by Visa and are shipped a counterfeight product, you can fill out a form and get your money back. I suspect most would agree that's good for consumers. It means, however, that Visa is ultimately on the hook for the money. If you buy MS Windows and get shipped a couterfeight copy, VISA could end up having to refund your money. Thus it's incumbent upon them to reduce fraud as much as practicable, because in the end the money comes out of their pocket. (If they can't retrieve the money from the scammer.) You would prefer that Visa would be required to a) knowlingly facilitate fraud and then b) pay back the money someone else stole?
In my experience more rip-offs, theft, lies and financial ruin are caused by payment processors, major banks, VISA, MasterCard, CitiBank and others of that ilk/mode/genre.
Malware on a Windows machine costs an hour to remove and $25.00 for Malwarebytes.
Tell me these assholes in the first paragraph haven't stolen more than $100.00 from you!
There's just no perspective anymore
May the lies we live by make us strong, healthy, happy and wise - Kurt Vonnegut.
It's based largely on "chargeback ratio". If 10% of the people who pay the company take the time to fill out fraud reports, it's probably a fraud. Secondly, the comoany can challenge the complaints. Most commonly, the complaint is "I paid, but I never recieved anything." The company can reply with a UPS tracking number. Another common complaint is "I didn't buy anything from the company, but they charged my card." That's why you sign the reciept, so the company can prove you authorized it. After being flagged by the percentage of complaints and how the company responded to them, a human being can check over the records, look at the web site, etc., comparing that company to others in the same industry that are about the same size. At that point you can pretty well tell if it's a scammer or not. These measures have been in place for decades and work quite well. Here's he part which is kind of new. It's the banks who run merchant accounts who handle complaints against their customers. The research shows that 12 banks don't care about fraud complaints and keep processing for the fraudsters . Since those 12 banks aren't doi.g their job under their contract with Visa, Visa is warning that they may termimate the contract unless the crime-friendly banks shape up and take fraud complaints seriously.
This is why we need bittorrent. I'm not saying that ripping people off is right although people need to *think* and be more savvy. We shouldn't go down this slippery slope of banning the exchange of moneybecause some company or government dictates. It's none of the governments business nor that of corporations like master card, visa, American express, or pharmaceuticals to tell me whom I should buy from. That is my business.
Some of the things that are banned that have/could after:
gambling
wikileaks
adult materials
etc
Right now countries in the middle east for instance are targeting some of these. The US government targeted gambling. People of the upper class and elite/propitiations targeted wikileaks
... for everything else, there's Bitcoin!
Do you know what 'vigilante justice' is ? Its something which the common people is forbidden to do, but now a larger company is now looked upon as doing 'the right thing' ?
No, this is no justice at all -- the justice system is not involved in it, just an at-will expulsion of customers -- this is safe-guarding profits.
Don't shut down the merchant account, suspend the banks. Make an example out of them and other banks might think twice about facilitating scammers.
Now that Visa's V.me is generally available in the US and Canada how about Visa/MasterCard closing the clunky PayPal's merchant account with the infamous Well Fargo Bank ...
Now that would curtail the activities of one of the great scammers, eBay's PreyPal ...
And, the reality of the clunky PayPal, et al ...
http://bit.ly/NFqjmp
eBay / PayPal / Donahoe: Dead Men Walking
As someone who has been forced to use the chip-and-pin system for some years (because I live in the UK) I can tell you that it's not that much more secure. The intrepid researchers in the Computer Science Dept at Cambridge have shown that there are many ways in which it can be compromised. The reason our banks are so keen on chip-and-pin is that if your card is misused you, the customer, have to foot the bill. When we had to sign credit card slips and someone forged your signature it was the bank (or other credit card issuer) which was liable. Shops also like it because the banks charge them a tiny bit less commission. What you in the USA should get rid of is your ridiculous system of requiring input of a zip code at gasoline stations. I can never use my non-US credit card to get gasoline in the US because I don't have a US zip code, and the machines appear to have no fall-back system as an alternative. I can't believe that the system gives you any significant amount of extra security.
that's why real criminals use bitcoin.
Banksters fighting Scammers
do you not see the problem in logic?
The purgery factory, with chronic robo-signed signed purgeries fighting a purgerer.
Fraud fighting fraud.
Malfeasance fighting Malfeasance
Misfeasance fighting Misfeasance
Chronic Loan defalter and accounting fraud accousing Loan defalter and accounting fraudster
Boring cunt.
You're wrong.
Customer agrees to terms. Customer breaks agreement. Vendor terminates services.
You're confusing private action to public action, or government action. There is no mob here; there are no vigilantes. There are two private parties with an at-will agreement.
Tom Geller
Thanks. Good program. I am surfing faster since I used it and the hosts file.
In which case they keep it 'under investigation' until the sun burns out or you cancel your account, whichever comes first.
In Colorado, the medical marijuana shops do not accept credit cards.Visa and MasterCard say since it is still illegal, they will not process payments (mainly because they might lose some of the money if the Feds crack down). They know where the money is going at all times.
And as long as the cost of the fraud is less than the cost of combating it, they will fight for the profit.
Visa & Mastercard are service providers that facilitate transactions between account holders and banks.
It's the banks that hold all the trails of which you speak, and without them money-laundering, which is where the big illicit profits are made, goes unattended. Citibank is notorious for facilitating drug money accounts, and let's not forget the Swiss banks who promoted tax evasion for the wealthiest and led to tax amnesty for Bush's base and Romney's raiders.
Going after what amounts to mom & pop internet operations is mice-nutz by comparison. And if you look at this in the broader context, it only ensures that traditional distribution channels for illicit substances remain alive active and insulated from competition.
If governments were serious about shutting drug money out of the electronic banking system, they'd use data mining techniques and share tax ID's and information. That way as black market physical currency transmission become more important, the threat to them would become commensurately more effective.
There was a 'scam' a few years ago where a bunch of people got together and opened a business selling sex toys online. But after ordering them, you'd receive a check for the amount of the order and a note saying it wasn't actually legal to sell sex toys in the jurisdiction they were based out of. The catch was the check was from a very obscene-sounding place, like "Anal lover's paradise empornium" or somesuch. As a result, many people didn't cash those checks, and they kept the money. It turned out to make them a lot of money, and it was completely legal (at the time anyway). While this is certainly unethical behavior, it wasn't fraud.
I doubt the scam you describe ever really happened, it's actually a throwaway line from one of my favorite movies, Guy Ritchie's "Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels". I suppose Ritchie could have based his dialog on a real life scam he heard about, but your description is practically word for word from the movie, so I'm guessing that's where you heard it. Or maybe someone else saw the film and passed on the description of the scam without attribution, who knows? Maybe it's become an urban myth? Regardless, I've always thought it's a great concept.
By his "effete retaliation" of a downmod of my post here -> http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3199293&cid=41721981
* 1 thing you've got to realize, troll (who downmods my posts consistently via his registered "luser" account): "I see every scenario, I see 50 scenarios - that's WHAT I DO TROLL! I'm always 50 moves ahead of you..." (albeit, in THIS case? 110++ moves ahead of you... lol!).
The best you had was an unjustifiable downmoderation of my post, but you're TOTALLY UNABLE TO DISPROVE ITS POINTS, and you know it, I KNOW IT, as does anyone with 1/2 a brain reading...
APK
P.S.=> Same as the film character Eddie Morra in "LIMITLESS" -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THE_hhk1Gzc&feature=related
... apk
We have a winner - The FBI, CIA, major banks, VISA, MasterCard, CitiBank and others of that ilk/mode/genre would like you to please take your glasses off so that you can not see clearly. This helps them
May the lies we live by make us strong, healthy, happy and wise - Kurt Vonnegut.