The Godfather of Credit Card Fraud

Dmitry Ivanovich Golubov is known by some as the Godfather of Credit Card Fraud. Mr. Golubov is active on the underground Web site CarderPlanet and he is considered an expert at both Trojan horse and malware hacking. His arrest in July 2005, at the ripe old age of 22, was front page news in the war on computer crime.

To read more on this article go to the Cape Cod Times April 29, 2008 article: “Meet Mr. Malware, and see how to avoid him”.

$0.40 cents buys you a stolen Credit Card Number

According to The Economic Times, the going rate for stolen credit card numbers ranges from $0.40 to $20 while bank account information ranges from $10 to $1000 per account. They also indicated that if you were willing to buy in bulk you could acquire 50 credit card numbers for $40 or 500 credit card numbers for $200.

In case you were curious, the same article quoted Symantec Corporation as stating that email passwords sell for as little as $4.00 to $30.00, while full identities are selling for between $1.00 and $15.00.

To read more of this article go to The Economic Times May 4th 2008 article “Credit Card Numbers up for grabs Rs 16!”.

Issuers – Focus on Expanding fraud prevention and detection abilities…

According to the Javelin Strategy & Research 2008 Card Issuers’ Identity Safety Scorecard results, the greatest opportunity for Issuers to reduce fraud losses is to expand on their abilities within prevention and detection.

Other notable excerpts:

“Bank of America Scores highest ranking on the Javelin’s 2008 Card Issuers’ Identity Safety Scorecard; second place went to Discover, followed by FNB Omaha and U.S. Bank.” Javelin Strategy & Research

“Findings Show That Arming Consumers with Expanded Account Monitoring Tools is Key to Security and Strengthening Customer Loyalty” Javelin Strategy & Research

For more information related to this subject go to the BusinessWire article “New Javelin Report Benchmarks 25 Top Credit Card Issuers for Consumer Identity Safety Features”

3 out of 4 Consumers Don’t Believe Retailers should be responsible for CNP Fraud Losses?

The debate has been ongoing for years, just who is responsible for the fraud losses associated with CNP fraud? I find it interesting that while the Associations, Banks, Issuers, Acquirers and Retailers continue to fight it out; the consumer’s have already made their opinion very clear: 3 out of 4 don’t believe that it is the retailers’ responsibility to absorb these fraud losses. I base this on recent surveys from CyberSource and CPP. CyberSource reported in their Cybersource’s 2008 UK Online Fraud report that 24% of consumers believe that retailers are ultimately responsible for fraud losses. CPP, a Life Assistance Firm, reported that 74% of the UK consumers questioned believe it is the responsibility of banks or credit card issuers to resolve any fraud problems.
For more information related to this subject go to the “CyberSource 2008 UK Online Fraud Report”, or the M2 PressWIRE April 7th 2008 article “CPP Group: Brits blame banks for fraud; More than a third or people blame banks for card fraud”.

Technique: Check Verification

Check Verification is a process that screens checks and check writers to assess the risk of the check being bad. These services typically will check to make sure the account is open, determine if the account has had bounced checks before and it will check a "negative database" of "bad check writers".

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Requiring CVV will drop sales conversion 40%???

I have to say up front that I actually find this hard to believe, and I cannot say I have ever seen or heard this from sites I was working with. According to the eCommerce Checkout Report, conducted by Elastic Path, and presented by Jason Billingsley, on the Internet's Top 100 Online Retailers merchants, merchants that did not make the card security code entry required were able to achieve a 40% higher conversion rate.

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Alternative Payments may lower Conversion Rates

Huh? I thought the idea behind alternative payment types was to increase sales conversion. So you can imagine my surprise when I was listening to the eCommerce Checkout Report from Elastic Path, Jason Billingsley, on the Internet's Top 100 Online Retailers. It appears from their survey, that merchants that did not offer alternative payments had a significantly higher conversion rate than those that did offer them.

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