US retailers call for serial numbers for online sales
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eBay must act on crime The US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary yesterday heard police and retail witnesses call for eBay to include serial numbers in its auction postings.â¦
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A backup tape containing credit-card information from hundreds of U.S. retailers is missing, forcing the company responsible for the data to warn customers that they may become the targets of data fraud.GE Money, which manages in-store credit-card programs for the majority of U.S. retailers, first realized that the tape was missing from an Iron Mountain secure storage facility in October, said Richard Jones, a company spokesman. &quot;We were informed that one of the tapes could not be located. But at the same time, there was no record of it ever having been checked out,&quot; he said.The tape contained in-store credit-card information on 650,000 retail customers, including those of J.C. Penney, he said. GE Money employees are also affected by the breach.The missing backup tape was unencrypted.Although J.C. Penney was the only company that Jones would confirm as affected by the missing tape, that retailer accounts for just a small percentage of all accounts that were compromised. In total, 230 retailers are affected by the breach. &quot;Clearly that number includes many of the national retail organizations,&quot; he said.The tape also contained Social Security numbers of 150,000 customers. When matched with name and address information, Social Security numbers can be used to set up fraudulent credit-card accounts, a common form of identity theft.Jones said that following a GE Money investigation, there is no evidence that the tape in question has been stolen or that the data it contained was misused.After reconstructing the data that was on the missing tape, GE Money began sending out letters to those affected by the breach in December. The company has set up a toll-free number and is offering one year of free credit monitoring services to those affected by the breach.In 2006, retailer TJ Maxx discovered that thieves had&#160;broken into its computer networks, stealing an estimated 94 million credit- and debit-card numbers. Costs related to that breach are expected to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.GE Money is a division of General Electric.
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Online buying continues to snowball, according to the results of a recent America Online survey. This year, for the first time, Americans who regularly use the Internet for shopping -- researching
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E-tailers have laggards and penny-pinchers to thank for last week&#39;s brisk sales, which grew 25 percent over the comparable period last year, according to comScore.Procrastinators and deal-seekers helped create a &quot;flurry&quot; of online spending last week in the U.S., keeping retail e-sales strong, comScore said Sunday.Between Nov. 1 and Dec. 21 -- the first 51 days of the holiday season -- U.S. shoppers have spent $26.3 billion online, up 19 percent compared with the corresponding period last year.So far, the heaviest online shopping day this season was Dec. 10, the so-called &quot;Green Monday,&quot; a term coined by eBay for the second Monday in December, which the vendor has identified as particularly heavy e-sales day. U.S. shoppers spent $881 million that day, up 33 percent from the corresponding day in 2006.By contrast, Cyber Monday, the first workday after the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., ranks as this holiday season&#39;s ninth heaviest online shopping day, with $733 million in sales. Cyber Monday is considered the day when holiday online shopping kicks into high gear.Overall, comScore expects this year&#39;s holiday season to generate about $29.5 billion in online spending, which would represent a 20 percent increase from the same period in 2006.
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Online merchants are poised to record a much bigger rise in holiday sales than their offline counterparts. Broadband expansion, more luxury gift sales and a rise in late shoppers help the bottom line. By Joanna Glasner.
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Holiday Web sales are running  ahead of forecast as online gift certificates helped give  Internet retailers a chance to participate in U.S. consumers'  last-minute shopping spree, Internet research firm comScore  Networks said on Wednesday.
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U.S. retailers kicked off the annual post-Christmas selling frenzy on Sunday, hoping that shoppers would flood stores to search for bargains or redeem gift cards and give profits a shot in the arm.
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Caveats to keep in mind while holiday shopping online.
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IF YOU know of any good value IT sales (auctions, rebates, one-off, clearance, surplus, classified ads) going around in the United Kingdom, France, USA or Singapore, don&#39;t hesitate to contact me, at least 24 hours before the sales end.
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Bad timing for J.C. Penney CEO Personal information belonging to more than 650,000 US customers of J.C. Penney and other retailers is at risk after the company hired to safeguard the data lost a backup tape.â¦
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Online merchants in the United States have become better at weeding out fraudulent credit card orders, a new survey indicates. But shipping overseas remains a risky venture. By Joanna Glasner.
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By Ben Goldby; James Green  Internet shoppers in the West Midlands have been warned to be on their guard after an investigation into eBay found the popular auction site is a prime target for counterfeiters.
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Trojan flea market thrives online Most people will be looking forward to receiving digital cameras, games and the like - as well as the inevitable pair of socks - this Christmas. But cybercrooks can take the opportunity to splash out, angling for things such as credit card numbers and their corresponding PINs, the trade in which is booming online.â¦
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The Sloan Center for Internet Retailing is turning to a new approach to make its annual forecast for online holiday sales: ask everybody.
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Many online merchants this year will still sell goods with standard shipping terms through Monday, Dec. 18, or Tuesday, Dec. 19, a boon for late holiday shoppers.
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Citing the high-tech theft of credit card numbers from Stop &amp; Shop Supermarket Cos., Massachusetts bankers yesterday urged state legislators to force retailers and others who fail to keep card data protected to pay all costs for fixing security breaches.
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ScanAlert has partnered with search and conversion marketing specialist WebShare, LLC to provide its online retailing customers with security services that make online shopping safer for consumers, and more profitable for retailers.