Reduction in card fraud in 2006
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There was a 3% drop in the amount of money lost to card fraud in 2006.
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Too many credit cards? Here's what to do.
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People fed up with the proliferation of credit cards, IDs and key cards that fill their wallets to bulging may soon have an alternative.
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When it comes to credit card abuse, your wallet may not be the only victim.
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Americans lost at least &#36;548 million to identity theft and consumer fraud last year as the Internet provided new victims for age-old scams, according to government statistics released Tuesday.
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Take advantage of cards instead of it being the other way around.
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Incidents of identity theft are decreasing, and the average loss as a result of fraud has dropped, a new study suggests. The improvement may reflect a higher awareness of the problem by consumers and businesses, say experts.
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(InfoWorld) - Credit card thieves are becoming big-time charity donors, but it's not out of the goodness of their hearts. According to Symantec, the criminals are starting to use charitable donations as a way to check whether their stolen credit card numbers are working. Fraudsters have been using a similar technique for years, but until recently, they tended to make minor purchases on online retail sites. Now, as these sites have become better at identifying and blocking these transactions, the criminals have begun looking elsewhere, said Zulfikar Ramzan, senior principal researcher with Symantec. "Using a charitable organization as a way to verify a credit card number is a relatively new technique, and it's probably being used by a minority of the more innovative guys," he said. Credit card numbers are bought and sold in underground "carder" forums, which bring together the people who have stolen the credit card numbers with those who want to use them. These charitable donations are typically made by the person buying the card numbers as a final check to ensure that the numbers will work, Ramzan said. Last month, the Red Cross was forced to return nearly $7,000 that was donated in the course of 700 fraudulent transactions, said Carrie Martin, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross. "We routinely see this kind of activity," she said. "We have someone in place who deals with this on a regular basis." This fraud accounted for a tiny sliver of the Red Cross's $6 billion in revenue last year, but the organization also has to pay staff to stay on top of the fraud, Martin said. This is not the only time that fraudsters have found ways to misuse charities. In another common scam, the criminal will give the charity a fake check and ask that a portion of it be returned in cash. Though the check will initially clear in the charity's bank account it will eventually be returned. By then, however, the charity will have already paid out to the thieves. "These kinds of things have hit charities before," said Ramzan "I feel bad because all these charities are trying to do good and you have these fraudsters that try to take advantage of them because of the way they work."
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InfoWorld - Identity theft remained top of mind among U.S. consumers last year, but complaints about Internet auction fraud dropped noticeably, according to data released Wednesday by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
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EDMONTON (CP) - While the Alberta government has promised to crack down on health card fraud, the steps it is taking fall far short of what some other provinces are doing.
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Regulation of online betting on the cards
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In its first two years, the UK's dedicated card fraud unit, has recovered 36,000 stolen cards and 171 arrests - and estimates it saved Â£65m.
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(InfoWorld) - Despite widespread media coverage of data breaches over the past year, identity fraud is actually dropping in the U.S., Javelin Strategy & Research Inc. reported Thursday. In fact, the cost of identity fraud was down 12 percent from Javelin's 2006 survey, at an estimated US$49.3 billion in losses. The number one source of ID fraud? A lost or stolen credit card. "ID fraud is down," said James VanDyke, Javelin's president and founder. "It hasn't been growing for several years, but we hadn't seen it drop." Nationwide, there were about 500,000 fewer victims, according to this year's survey, VanDyke said. Much of the drop can be attributed to improved antifraud practices on the part of consumers and businesses, he said. "Businesses are doing a better job of not granting new accounts [to criminals]," he said. And consumers are also monitoring their account activity more closely and reporting suspicious transactions to the banks much more quickly. Javelin based its findings on 5,000 telephone interviews with U.S residents conducted over three weeks last October. The survey follows a methodology established by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which released a similar study back in 2003. The Javelin research was sponsored by CheckFree Corp., Visa USA Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. The survey's findings are at odds with those of research firm Gartner Inc., which has reported that ID theft is on the rise. But VanDyke says that this is because Javelin's numbers include responses from a wider range of people, including those who lack Internet access. "Thirty percent of people in the U.S. are not on the Internet, and those people have a vastly different way of managing their finances," he said. According to Javelin, there are also important differences between the way rich and poor people react to ID theft, something that VanDyke describes as a "fraud detection digital divide." "The low-income people essentially run away from purchases and they run away from the Internet," Van Dyke said. Affluent people, on the other hand, tend to embrace the Internet as a way to avoid having sensitive data stolen from the mail, and to keep tabs on their account activity, he said. Mail theft accounted for about 9 percent of all ID compromises. That's more victims than data breaches and phishing combined, according to Javelin's numbers. Javelin also found that young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 were at greater risk of ID theft, with more than 5 percent of respondents having been victimized. "They're being haphazard and as a result, they're being victimized," VanDyke said. "They're not protecting their PCs with antivirus software and firewalls.
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Identity theft victims are also losing more money and getting less of it back, research shows.
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(InfoWorld) - Identity theft remained top of mind among U.S. consumers last year, but complaints about Internet auction fraud dropped noticeably, according to data released Wednesday by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). More than a quarter of a million ID theft complaints were lodged with the agency last year, accounting for 36 percent of the 674,000 complaints the FTC received. That number is down slightly from 2005, when ID theft accounted for 37 percent of all complaints. This marks the seventh consecutive year that identity theft has been ranked number one. The second-largest number of complaints, 7 percent, came from consumers who were unhappy with products they had ordered from catalogs. Internet-related complaints were up too. According to the 2006 data, they made up 60 percent of all fraud complaints. Last year, they accounted for 46 percent. But one area of Internet fraud declined noticeably: Internet auctions. In last year's report, complaints relating to products purchased on online auction sites like eBay made up 12 percent of the FTC submissions. In the 2006 numbers released Wednesday, that number had plummeted to 5 percent. The FTC has made identity theft a priority over the past few years, and the agency maintains a Web site where consumers can learn how to protect themselves and file complaints if they've been victimized. The FTC is also one of the agencies heading up the U.S. government's Identity Theft Task Force, created by President George Bush in 2006. "It's not surprising to me that identity theft is number one because we're the ID theft clearinghouse," said FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras. The fact that the FTC saw a slight drop in the percentage of its complaints that related to ID fraud appears to back upÂ a downward trend reported last week by Javelin Research. The research firm said that ID fraud was down in the U.S. with the cost of this type of crime dropping 12 percent in 2006. The FTC stressed that its consumer complaints data is merely anecdotal. However, the agency is working on a more rigorous study of identity fraud trends and is expected to release that data in the coming months. Majoras said it was unclear whether ID fraud is increasing but hopes that the Javelin numbers are right. Her sister was the victim of identity theft recently after falling prey to a phishing attack, she said. "I said to her, 'You can't fall for stuff like that,'" she said. Â
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US consumers and businesses have lost an estimated 500 million dollars to a relatively new Internet scam known as &quot;phishing,&quot; according to a survey released this week.
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New safeguards on credit and debit card payments in shops has led fraudsters to focus on internet and phone payments, an anti-fraud agency says.