Criminals are obtaining more tools to sort through the massive amount of card data to determine which cards are good and bad. Several commercial sites have sprung up that offer services to cybercriminals to check balances and limits on cards. They even offer volume discount! It’s estimated by experts that about 25,000 debit and credit cards are checked daily. These sites provide valuable information to the crooks and the only obstacles are the ability to read Russian and pay with virtual currencies, such as Webmoney.
How can they do this?
Well, many of these sites are able to hack the credit card payment networks to conduct “pre-authorization requests”. As you know the preauth places a temporary hold on the account, to make sure there is enough money to pay the bill. This happens all the time from restaurants to hotels. The cybercriminal have no intent on settling the transaction, they just want to see how much money is available on the card.
The cybercriminals also have designed their sites to check the cards using legitimate high jacked merchant account numbers and using unrelated merchant names. There have been incidents where merchants have complained to state governments about customers calling saying, “I didn’t buy that! Why are you charging me?” However, the state has been unable to do anything because the merchants have not experienced any financial loss. The accounts are changed frequently and the criminals bank on companies using different financial processing systems that don’t share data.
Friday, June 12, 2009
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1 comment:
It seems like the states should be able to do something about this. Each call to the merchant service is an instance of wire fraud as the criminal pretends they're someone else in order to obtain information for fraudulent purposes over comm lines.
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