Why Are CC Numbers Still So Easy To Find? 317
Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton gives the full-disclosure treatment to the widely known and surprisingly simple technique for finding treasure-troves of credit card numbers online. He points out how the credit-card companies could plug this hole at trivial expense, saving themselves untold millions in losses from bogus transactions, and saving their customers some serious hassles. Read on for Bennet's article.
Some "script kiddie" tricks still work after all: Take the first 8 digits of a standard 16-digit credit card number. Search for them on Google in "nnnn nnnn" form. Since the 8-digit prefix of a given card number is often shared with many other cards, about 1/4 of credit card numbers in my random test, turned up pages that included other credit card numbers, and about 1 in 10 turned up a "treasure trove" of card numbers that were exposed through someone's sloppily written Web app. If the numbers were displayed along with people's names and phone numbers, sometimes I would call the users to tell them that I'd found their cards on the Internet, and many of them said that the cards were still active and that this was the first they'd heard that the numbers had been compromised.
Now, before this gets a lot of people mad, let me say that at first I was planning on holding off writing about this for months if necessary, to give the credit card companies time to do something about it. In other words, I actually had the presumptuousness to think that I had been the first one to discover it, but only because the credit card numbers that I found were still active. (If the trick had been widely known, I reasoned, surely the credit card companies would have found any credit card numbers listed in Google before I did, and gotten them cancelled.) Then I found that the trick had been publicized about three years earlier in a C-Net article by Robert Lemos and was probably widely known even before that. (The article stops just short of describing the actual technique, but one reader posted the full details in a follow-up comment.) Another article from that year in CRM Daily describes an even more efficient trick: Googling for number ranges like 4060000000000000..4060999999999999 to find Visa card numbers beginning with "4060". Google has now blocked that trick, so that trying that as a Google search leads to an error page. But the basic technique of Googling for working credit card numbers, apparently still works. In other words, credit card companies have apparently known about this technique for at least three years, probably longer, and presumably have hoped it would continue being swept under the rug.
At this point, I think the right thing to do is to shine a light on the problem and insist that they fix it as soon as possible. It may result in a short-term spike in people using this technique, but if it results in the problem being fixed, then the total number of fraud incidents will probably be less in the long run.
It would be simple for companies like Visa, MasterCard, and Discover to take a list of the most common 8-digit prefixes, query for them every day on Google, and de-activate any new credit card numbers that were found that way. (American Express cards are apparently not vulnerable to this trick, because when their 15-digit card numbers are written with spaces, they are usually written in the format "3xxx xxxxxx xxxxx", and Googling for the first 10 digits as "3xxx xxxxxx" didn't yield anything in my random test of ten AmEx numbers. But this is still their problem too, since the searches that turn up "treasure troves" of card numbers usually include AmEx numbers as well.) A Perl programmer could write a script in one afternoon that could run through all the known 8-digit prefixes, parse the search results, and pick out any URLs that weren't listed as matches the day before. From there, the search results would have to be reviewed by a human, in order to spot any situations where one credit card number was exposed at one URL, and a slight variation on the same URL (such as varying an order ID number) would expose other credit card numbers as well, which was the case with several of the hits that I found. Simple, but time-consuming with so many different 8-digit prefixes -- but every minute of effort expended on tracking down and canceling leaked credit card numbers, would save time and grief later by preventing the numbers from being used by criminals. If it would save them time in the long run and help prevent fraud, then why don't they do this?
It's considered good etiquette among security researchers, when finding a new security hole, to give the affected companies a chance to fix the issue before publicizing it. When I first contacted the credit card companies and described exactly how the exploit worked and how to block it, after getting a polite "We can't comment" from each one, I figured I'd give them a few months to get a system in place that could find leaked cards on a daily basis and de-activate them before they could be used. But then I found the C-Net article from 2004, and figured that if the card companies hadn't taken action in three years, it was fair game to publicize the trick in order to increase the pressure on them to plug the gap. Of course, it's not the card companies' fault that these card numbers are leaked onto the Web; it's the fault of the merchants that allowed them to get leaked. But the credit card companies are the only ones who are in a position to do something about it.
I did try the "Good Samaritan" approach, calling the credit card companies when I found one of their customers' card numbers on the Web. For each of the four major card companies, I called their security departments and reported two of the cards that I had found compromised, and then a week later, called the cardholders themselves to see if the card companies had notified them. Surprisingly, of the four companies, American Express was the only one whose customers in this experiment, when I called them a week later, said that AmEx had contacted them and told them to change their numbers. But even if all four credit card companies were more proactive about acting on reports of leaked numbers, the problems with scaling this approach are that (a) I usually had to wait on hold for a few minutes with each company and then spell out each card number that I'd found, which doesn't scale for a large number of stolen card numbers, and (b) if lots of people started doing this, then the credit card companies would be inundated with duplicate reports about the "low-hanging fruit", card numbers with common prefixes that appear near the top of some Google search result. Both problems could be avoided if the card companies simply ran their own script that queried Google and brought up a list of any indexed card numbers, whereupon an employee could copy and paste the numbers into an interface that would flag the cards instantly.
Google does have a feature where you can request the removal of pages that contain credit card numbers and other personal data such as Social Security Numbers. Any pages that I found containing credit card data, I submitted for removal, and Google did handle each removal request within two days. But this doesn't guard against the possibility that someone might have found the credit card information before it was removed, and of course it doesn't mean that other search engines like Alta Vista (remember Alta Vista?) might not have indexed the same pages. Running a sample of 8-digit prefix searches on Alta Vista, I found about as many credit cards as I found through Google, including some pages that were not in the Google index (maybe Google never indexed them, or maybe they had removed them already). So removing a page from any engine's search results is more like covering up a symptom of a problem than fixing the problem itself, which is the fact that the card number was leaked to the Web in the first place.
If nothing else, this is another reminder of how terrible the security model is for credit card numbers as a token of payment -- one universal piece of information shared with every merchant, that can be used for unlimited unauthorized charges if it gets compromised, until someone notices. About the only desirable property of credit card numbers from a security point of view is that they can be changed, and most of your existing recurring billing relationships will carry over, but even that is a hassle. Several credit card companies do provide the ability to generate single-use credit card numbers, each one authorized only for a limited purchase amount. The problem with that is that as any security analyst will tell you, if it takes even one extra step, most people won't bother -- as long as all-purpose credit card numbers are the default, that's what most people will use. Perhaps incidents like this will push people towards more 21st-century-aware styles of payment (like PayPal, but without all the horror stories), where you can pay a bill through a system that debits your card or your bank account, without sharing all your information with the merchant.
But in the short term, as long as credit card numbers are still with us, the card companies should make more proactive efforts to find and deactivate the ones that have been leaked on the Internet. If the card numbers are found to be leaked by a clumsy Web interface on one company's site, then that company should be chastised by the card companies that issued them a merchant account. If the numbers are found together in a list posted on some third-party forum, then the companies can cross-reference the charge history against each card in the list, to narrow down which merchant may have been responsible for the leak. I'm sure the card companies do something like this already when they find a list of leaked cards; what they don't seem to be doing is acting aggressively enough to find the leaked numbers in the first place.
Maybe the real moral is not the insecurity of credit card numbers, but the value of transparency and online community relations. If MasterCard had been a hip company like Wikia, some volunteer probably would have discovered this attack very early, and another volunteer would have written an open-source tool to find and deactivate leaked MasterCard numbers automatically, and the problem would have been solved ten years ago. In fact many tech companies, if you report a security problem to them, will thank you and fix it immediately, and some of them will even offer you cash if you find any more, like Netscape used to do with their $1,000 Bugs Bounty program. We get so used to big companies having obvious holes in their security practices and answering every question about security with a flat "No comment", that we forget it doesn't have to be that way -- transparency is not just trendy, it works. After years of having bug hunters poke at the Netscape browser, the security may not have been perfect, but it didn't have any security holes that were as simple and obvious as to be analogous to finding credit card numbers on Google.
How much is it a problem? (Score:2, Insightful)
How can a normal fraudster use a credit card number to his personal gain?
Does he get goods delivered to his house?
Anything purchased with it has an audit trail.
It's not like you can turn up in a shop and swipe the printout or screenshot, and making up blank cards isn't yet in the hands of the common criminal.
I will go out on a limb and say most credit card fraud occurs in the real owners home town right about the time of alcohol consumption.
Regret buying that 'funky' leopard skin jacket?
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Several years ago when one of my credit cards was compromised, I saw a whole bunch of bogus charges made at gas stations all over southern California.
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Re:How much is it a problem? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Seriously? I've never been asked for anything when using a credit card, besides its expiration date, and occasionally the billing address (what they're interested in is the billing ZIP code, generally). Signature checks are bogus -- in most stores, you could draw a picture of the goatse.cx guy and the clerk wouldn't ever say anything, and of course there's no signature on the Internet
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THIS is why it's a problem... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How much is it a problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does he get goods delivered to his house?
I recall reading that one guy had a bunch of credit card details, and of course came up against that very problem. His solution was to put up a pile of auctions on eBay for various big-ticket items. When those auctions ended and he got the funds, he used the credit cards to order the items and have them shipped to the winners' homes. By the time the people whose cards were used found out, the only information available was for the folks who won the auctions, and the seller was nowhere to be found.
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The irony here is that, in theory, if the fraudster had offered to cut his victims in on the deal, it would have been just a regular old business partnership. (But of course, his take would have been much less.)
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Re:Not so clever? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is real life. If you add enough layers of obsfuscation, you win.
Suppose he setup a P.O. box with a fake ID for the payments, "borrowed" an unoccupied house, or just had the money sent to his neighbor's address?
There are a lot of ways to get money orders cashed, or he could have setup a checking account using a fake identity.
Obsfuscation works because all the criminal needs is to have one trick in the works that makes the investigating officer throw up his hands and say, "I don't know where else to go with this."
Re:Not so clever? (Score:5, Interesting)
1) One was my card. The fraud was an internal job at Chase. Locked cards that I could not make charges were still getting new charges, dates were being moved around after I pointed this out, and replacement accounts were being used before cards were even being printed. Online access to view purchases the account that showed purchases before the post date on the replacement cards envelope was cut off. Chase simply refused to even discuss the possibility that the fraud was internal. After the third card in a row showed up with fraudulent activity, I simply made sure all accounts were canceled and put Chase on the list of businesses not to do business with.
2) Another was my wife's. Her estranged mother opened an account under her name, ran up the card, then filed bankruptcy. We found out about it from a credit report when we went to refinance our home. The card was opened before she turned 18, and over a year after she was no longer living at home. My wife offered to testify so they could prosecute. Their response was that since they had removed her name from the account, they would no longer discuss the account with her.
3) A friend had charges made on his card. The items were purchased mail order, so there was an address to track the person down with. The local police said that they would not deal with it because you had to contact the police where the card was used. The police where the purchase was made said that they would not deal with, and that he needed to contact his local police department.
So, of the three credit card frauds I have personally been privy to, I don't see that there is any attempt to even slow down the fraud. I have to assume that there is some way that the credit card companies make money off of the fraud.
Of course that is why I absolutely refuse to have a 'Check Card'. Given how easy it is to commit credit card fraud, there is no way in hell, I want someone to have anonymous access to my checking account. The downstream problems with things like other bounced checks is just not worth given that they have no advantages over a credit card. Hell, instead of giving me an ATM card that doesn't require a pin, how about giving me a credit card that does. They even advertise how easy it is to commit fraud with 'Check Cards'.
Re:How much is it a problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
My bank called me to ask if I was in Istanbul, Turkey, over the weekend. When I said "No", they said: "But your Visa Card was", and they did not seem at all surprised that the physical card was still in my possession.
They gave me a nice list of events: First the thugs bought something small, then tried something big. As the card was declined, they tried something small again, and then a couple of medium purchases (like $100 a piece).
All in all, they had racked up about $1000 when the call came, but I did not have to cover any of that, luckily.
Again, all of these were in-store purchases.
Alex
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Of course it doesn't. Instead, it passes the risk onto the consumer, viz: "Your card was used in conjunction with your PIN, therefore either you did it or you were careless with your PIN. Either way, it's your problem".
There was a case recently (google for it) where a major UK bank only issued about 3 or 4 different PINs, so if you didn't change the PIN you'd been issued anyone could guess it correctly in 4 tries.
Re:How much is it a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
So as you can see, the fact that you think an "audit trail" prevents such crimes comes down to a lack of imagination on your part, and a very false sense of security. It is exactly that false sense of security and lack of imagination which explains why identity theft is rampant.
Re:How much is it a problem? (Score:5, Informative)
Card data can also be turned into products in most stores. The stolen info can be burned on to an expired card, and the thief anonymously walks out of a store with an HDTV. More clever thieves will go to a store that's out of their norm, one that doesn't see as much fraud -- perhaps a craft store or a furniture store -- and buy a bunch of merchandise, and resell it on the streets or at flea markets. There are sophisticated organized theft rings that will purchase certain kinds of stolen merchandise and pose as legitimate wholesalers that resell it to small merchants.
The underground economy revolving around stolen merchandise and credit cards is rapidly approaching a hundred billion dollars annually in America alone (last figure I saw a year or two ago put the estimate over 60 billion, not counting the MAFIAA.) It's obviously pretty easy to do, if you think like a criminal.
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1. Long distance calling cards
2. Online delivery of movies, software products, porn, or anything else with instant gratification.
3. Print Fake Credit Cards with the numbers on them and go shopping (Yes. This is in the hands of the common criminal)
My wife's card number was stolen and used to purchase hundreds of dollars of items at a mall over 1000 miles from our home. We did get the charges reversed but it took a number of phone calls (even though their fraud depar
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This can be done either by obtaining merchant accounts directly (not as difficult or traceable as you might think) or just convincing the cle
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I had this happen to me. Someone bought some Amazon gift cards I had on eBay for $50 or so. I sent the codes (which is my own fault for being trusting on the internet) about 2 weeks later I got the paypal "This was bought using a stolen credit card, etc etc".
I guess this has happened in the past and Amazon has refused to give out the account information it was used on. $50 isn't worth their time, after all they didn't 'lose' anything.
Take this one step further. Re-sell the Amazon
Re:How much is it a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, using the above methods may not allow you to target anyone specifically, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking that there aren't plenty of people who would happily take a whole load of these credit card numbers and use them to implicate complete strangers in this way. Just for the hell of it.
Money lost on stolen credit cards can be reclaimed. Lives destroyed by false charges cannot.
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Also, I have hear of instances where people will use a stolen CC to setup a fake bank account, and then perform many small wire transfers from other CC"s into the fake account until it h
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Of course you gotta be quick about it and not use a house too many times or the police might catch on and stake it out--although all they can technically get you on is theft of the one item if you're careful.
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Dateline NBC did a story on this problem this very week and found that with the full cooperation of the credit card companies, it was still quite time consuming to run down the real perps.
Here's what they did:
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How can a normal fraudster use a credit card number to his personal gain?
Does he get goods delivered to his house?
Buy services. Easier. Buy subscriptions to fake (or real) web sites - small amounts through a billing co., lots of victims won't even notice.
How does this help the fraudster ?
Who gets the money ? - Website owner.
How easy is it to set up a subscription porn website ? Not hard - look at how many there are.
Fraudster just sets up the website and uses stolen cards to buy subs to it.
Anything purch
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Seriously, mailto? (Score:3)
Finding credit cards numbers is easy (Score:2)
4245 8611 9994 1245
8847 1210 5566 0625
Now
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#4455 6677 9933 2233 Mr. A Bravo, 231 Some Road, Some Where, XX4 6YY, CVN 123
... well, the OP mentions he rang 'em up, so I'd assume the details were a little more complete than just the CCN.
username:3DESPASS
Clearly it's a result of a disgusting signup form, but
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Re:Finding credit cards numbers is easy (Score:5, Funny)
That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage.
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Sheesh, if you are going to be pompous at least be correct
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I found a nasty case of this a few years ago on an incorporation website that stored SSNs, CCs, Company and Owner Names (along with partner names and SSNs), etc. After I called the guy - he wanted me to fix it for free for him and told me it was my civic duty to fix the problem...
Re:Finding credit cards numbers is easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Second number isn't a credit card number at all. Maybe a calling card or something (telecom MII).
Why don't you post your REAL VISA number?
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Please, get a grip an choose between 'I will not use a creditcard' or 'Creditcards are insecure but I'll use 'm anyway'. This has al
It's six digits, not eight. (Score:2, Informative)
Oy (Score:3, Interesting)
This whole thing should come as no shock. The Internet was not built with security in mind. I don't think anyone imagined the degree to which it would become a method of commerce. Certainly when the first websites were given the ability to accept and process credit cards, the card companies had been dealing with fraud for years, in terms of lost/stolen/duplicated cards. I remember working in a convenience store in the 80's and getting small booklets in the mail from the credit card companies with lists of fraudulent numbers. Like I was going to look them up!
Credit cards could be made much more secure. It would be expensive, no doubt, as it would require fundamental changes to the system, but compare that to the price of all the fraud currently committed and I'm pretty sure the ROI is pretty good.
Because... (Score:5, Insightful)
According to a 2002 report Visa's commissions alone were over $455 million. If that entire $300,000/month fee was all on Visa, the 3.6 million a year is a drop in the bucket to them, less than 1% of their commission. Trust me, if it cost them less to setup the system than the money that's lost, it would be done.
Re:Because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Because... (Score:5, Interesting)
Person reports the fraud to CC company
CC company issue charge back notice to merchant gives them time to dispute etc.
CC company takes the amount of the charge (not what they gave the merchant after fees) + $35 bucks charge back fee from the merchant
Refunds all or most of the charges to the CC holder, issues a new card etc.
If they find the merchant the cards got stolen from they fine them and change them to reissue cards, Fines alone can be 500k, and I have heard of 5 figure fines for a handful of stolen cards. They have some good software that correlates stolen cards and what merchants have ever seen the cards.
So no visa etc does not loose anything they shifted that liability to the merchant for accepting the fraudulent charges.
Which is pretty fucked up (Score:5, Informative)
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We had someone rack up $24K on my wifes card before SHE CAUGHT IT because the card was denied for suddenly being over limit. Our only saving grace with the card company was the fraudster used it to buy lottsa funiture which had not been delivered yet, just billed.
Otherwise we would have been on the hook. Funny how they don't call you when buying $24K in furniture half way across the country, but will call you if you use it to book a hotel room two states over.
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It's really only an issue if the cvv digits are there as well - without those they're really just a group of numbers.
re: write offs (Score:2)
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And I don't think it's still the case, but for quite a long time, MasterCard was actually listed as a *non profit corporation*
Definitely not the case any longer [google.com].
the real point is annoying their customers (Score:2)
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This is a textbook example of what economists call negative externality [wikipedia.org] or economic loss experienced by third parties to a transaction through no (reasonable) fault of their own, but a loss all the same. The credit card company doesn't care that your card being compromised potentially causes massive disruptions to your life as your credit is dragged through the mud (i.e. you don't get hired or get a car loan
because the credit card companies don't care (Score:5, Interesting)
The credit card companies have no security. They don't care either. It's not them that will foot the bill. As a consumer it is great that you can only get stuck for $50 of fradulent charges. But as a merchant you loose your merchandise and the fraudulent payment. You can receive authorization from the credit card company saying the transaction is good, but they can and do still take the money away from you.
I've had about a dozen cases of obviously fraudulent orders. The first few I would call the credit card company, report the suspicious card, etc. They did nothing. On one I found out the real owner of the card, called them, and they hadn't even been contacted by the credit card company. I had all of the details that the police would have needed to get the scammer and the credit card company wouldn't even take that information.
Now I just delete any order that looks unusual.
Re:because the credit card companies don't care (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone places a fraudulent order and the merchant ships the the product(s) even if they receive authorization from the credit card company, the credit card company will debit the merchant for the entire order, including the transaction fees.
Not only did the credit card company not lose any money on the bad transaction, they will also charge the merchant a fee for the fraudulent order. So the merchant is out the cost of the goods that were shipped, plus shipping, plus a fee.
The credit card company makes money on the fraudulent transaction.
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If it was any other way, then a crooked merchant could literally sit there defruading the government/credit card co.
This is only true for unverifiable payment methods, such as cash or credit cards. Note that the CC authorization only covers the issuer's end of things, but does nothing to ensure that the card holder authorizes the transaction.
A payment system that verified the transaction with both the issuer and the card holder would have to be resistant to merchant tampering.
Re:because the credit card companies don't care (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:because the credit card companies don't care (Score:4, Interesting)
The card companies have structured the system so that liability rests with the merchants.
In part, this is smart because merchants will always have the best 'hinkiness' detectors at the point of the transaction. But it also means that the incentives for system-wide changes by the credit card vendors are weak.
There is certainly is room for improvement. I always thought it'd be cool for merchants to band together to share suspicious credit card #s that have hit their system (ie ones from merchants' "suspicious/deleted" orders which otherwise the ccard companies never see since we don't even attempt to push them through their systems), and, in return, be able to crosscheck cards entered into their system against the suspicious list. A nice web API to do this wouldn't be too hard, although the API shouldn't itself take or reveal the entire card # either, for security reasons. But it could return spam-assassin-like scores and/or hints for other merchants' manual review ("A telecom merchant in NJ found a card matching 12 of those digits and with the same zip code suspicious 4 hours ago").
--LP
Re:because the credit card companies don't care (Score:4, Interesting)
Pretty much all you need to know about it is that the chargeback department is seen as a profit center, and they were proud of the millions in chargeback money they added to the bottom line. Sure, there were a few "bad apples" among the merchants who were frauds and got what they had coming to them. However, the vast majority were Mom and Pops who through no fault of their own wound up on the wrong end of a chargeback.
For example, Sally Suburb pays for auto repair via her Visa card, and Hubby decides it was too much and disputes the charge. There was nothing wrong with the repair, and the amount was legitimate, he just didn't thought it was too much. In due course it's charged back and now the mechanic has to come up with the full amount plus fees and expenses.
Looking over the files, I saw chargebacks had put lots of these folks out of business and into bankruptcy. I suppose I'm too much of a sentimentalist, but I couldn't be a part of that. They kept calling for months but I wouldn't even talk to them. Effin' vampires if you ask me. Nowhere in business will you find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy, not even in insurance or banking.
Retailers (Score:4, Informative)
Key loggers (Score:2)
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Edited for the time impaired (Score:5, Informative)
1) Take the first 8 digits of a standard 16-digit credit card number. Search for them on Google in "nnnn nnnn" form.
2) You'll find lots of credit card numbers
3) Profit
4) Credit Card companies should have employees who Google for credit card numbers and de-activate any card whose number is found in the ' net. Thank you.
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Credit Card companies should have employees who Google for credit card numbers and de-activate any card whose number is found in the ' net. Thank you.
Deactivating the cards doesn't eliminate the problem. Those same merchants will be losing credit card numbers again next week, that's why the current deterrent is "if" card numbers are stolen "and" you don't meet these security standards, you may be fined and lose your ability to process credit cards. ie. ruin the dimwit that's posting cc#s on the Internet.
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Right - and here I am in a city distant from my home (maybe even overseas), and all the sudden I have no credit card. Or, I'm one of those people who charges everything to their card and pays it all in one lump sum at the end of the month - all of the sudden my charges start bouncing. (And I have to spend many hours refilling out forms to send the charges to my new
Why? because it does not cost the CC companies.... (Score:4, Informative)
Because it does not cost the credit card companies.
When fraud is reported, the credit card company charges back to the merchants. As such, the credit card company is out relatively little money (it is the merchants who get screwed).
Adding meaningful security to credit cards would cost the credit card companies money. It would also make people less likely to use their cards, costing the credit card companies more money.
Also, the credit card companies can use fraud to justify higher interest rates, annual fees, and as a marketing gimmick to sell their card over others.
So, to recap: fraud costs the card companies little, preventing fraud would cost them much.
Has this helped identify why credit card fraud is so easy?
Datum: A friend of mine was involved with a large e-commerce site. He detected an on-going fraud ring trying to buy large amounts of goods from the site with stolen cards. He reported it to the card companies - "Here are the cards. Here's where they are trying to send the goods. Do you want to nail these guys?"
The response: "Thanks, but no, it's not worth our time. Just don't send them anything."
Calling the police doesn't always work (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem with this, speaking from personal experience, is that if the CC companies cancel all of the fraudulent transactions, then the police won't do anything, because you're not out any money (despite the criminal INTENT of the perpetrator).
You somehow have to find out the details of the
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CC Companies Don't Care -- Merchants Get Screwed (Score:4, Informative)
When someone uses someone else's credit card fraudulently, it's not like the credit card company eats the loss. They just do a chargeback against the merchant who accepted the fraudulent transaction and they have to eat the cost. In fact, the CC company charges the merchant a hefty fee for the privilege of eating the cost.
Of course, that cost just gets passed on to you, the customer, in the form of higher prices.
Ain't credit cards grand?
Re:CC Companies Don't Care -- Merchants Get Screwe (Score:2)
The merchant is the person closest to the person using the card fraudulent, so the burden to discover the fraud and prevent it should rightly fall on their shoulders. Instead, the merchant chooses to be lazy and doesn't even look to see if the card actually belongs to the person handing it to them.
This article should be forwarded immediately... (Score:3, Interesting)
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I tried this technique and found a local vendor with an Excel file full of CC's and CCVs! I called the contact, and apparently another Slashdot reader beat me to it. I imagine she'll get a hundred calls today...
Reminds me of the crypto saying, "Anyone who says the brute force method doesn't always work obviously isn't using enough of it."
The Money Call (Score:2)
Why doesn't my card give onetime passwords to them, attached to the transaction amount, and also reported directly to my bank for a single, auditable transaction in that amount?
And why do I use an easily guessa
Re: (Score:2)
Instead of the way it is now, where I hand it out to anyone. Some of whom aren't just neighborhood thieves. Some of them live in countries where US law cannot reach them. Some because they are just foreign countries with a bureaucracy too inconvenient for recovering small losses. Others because their countries are largely anarchies. And some of the latter have global networks that need to steal money this way to finance
Why should cc companies care? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Tilting at Windmills (Score:2)
The prime security weakness lies with the web service providers, who are failing to adequately secure their backend systems, not the credit card companies. It is the same problem as eating at a restaurant where they are skimming cards in the back room - you just can't be sure that your card has remained safe after every transaction. The logistics of ensuring a brand new card number for each and every transaction for each and eve
CC companies don't care (Score:2)
Fraudalent activity is costly for the business taking the transaction - the CC company does a chargeback and they are not only out the money but also out a fee.
Fraudalent activity is irrelevant to the CC company - it does generate some revenue via chargeback fees I guess so there is some incent
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
A couple problems (Score:2)
First off, this seems very idealistic.
Second, automatic deactivation of card numbers is not necessarily a good thing. What if someone creates a list of thousands of potential credit card numbers on a website -- do
Not just credit card numbers (Score:2)
Trying a few of the other CC numbers listed in such a PDF found me an absolute treasure trove of numbers, complete with all the info I'd need to make purchases with those cards, including the little "security codes" (which I thought were not even supposed to be recorded).
Oops.
Summary is Misleading (Score:2)
1. The banks do not "pay" for fraud. Merchants who have the fraudulent transactions pay for fraud. Therefore, the cost of fraud is assumed by all consumers in the form of higher prices. In fact, the banks profit from fraudulent transactions by charging the merchant penalties.
2. There is a well implemented and secure banking standard that is in many places in the world. Except no bank in the U.S. wants to implement it because of the costs the bank h
similar to the terminal services exploit long ago (Score:3)
this is basically the same thing
Re: (Score:2)
Credit Cards? Just say no. (Score:2)
They are prone to theft(like described article) and cost more then plain cash purchases.Most people who insist on
using such a card have a money to watse and need a convinient way to waste it.
Re: (Score:2)
Using cash for online transactions is somewhat tricky. And, since you can often get things for less online than you can via bricks-n-mortar, it is often a money saver.
Unless you're arguing that all the things you can buy online are unnecessary expenditures - but, while I admit "necessary" may be too strong a word in the "need this to survive" sense, I rather enjoy living a life where I have books and a computer.
I'm also unfamiliar with any modern store that actually charges mor
Why should they? (Score:2)
Its only if a compromised card is USED by an attacker that there is a problem. But since cards get stolen as well, they have heavy misuse detection to catch this, and if they let a few slip through, they aren't the ones holding the bill anyway, as it usually ends up being chargebacked to the merchant who accepted the bogus card.
Solutions (Score:2)
2.Make the BANKS, not the merchants liable for credit card fraud (in the same way as they are liable if someone steals your ATM card and PIN and uses it to wi
Is identity theft really that big a problem? (Score:2)
The reason I'm suspicious about this is because there's now a huge market for "identity theft protection" solutions. Aren't they just stirring up foam to get people panicked about losing money?
Anyone who doesn't pay attention to their credit card statemen
Easyer ways to get cards. (Score:2)
The first 6 digits ID the issuer, They are common because you were looking for
Re:Important Missing Step (Score:5, Informative)
At the top of TFA:
"I would call the users to tell them that I'd found their cards on the Internet, and many of them said that the cards were still active and that this was the first they'd heard that the numbers had been compromised."
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would you think that? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd hazard a bet that the majority of the leaks, especially the ones the article talks about, are fifty-cent web applications running on a LAMP stack on an ultracheap web host somewhere.
The problem with that line of reasoning is that LAMP, though free and cheap is obviously better than IIS. The same thing can be applied to retail software. In the free software world, you are never alone. Instead of slapping together a second rate web app yourself, you can install a good one that does not have this fiv
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Apache 2.0.x has had 31 vulnerabilities in the same time period: Here. [secunia.com]
What were you saying again?
Re:Blame M$ (Score:5, Insightful)
A bug exposing credit card numbers is language agnostic. Even experienced programmers can create security bugs. Even EXPERT programmers can create security bugs. Your notion that there's a correlation between a langauge and a propensity for bugs is outrageously wrong. if that were the case, you'd never have a rich client app written in C or C++ crash on you.
And your idea that "the ones smart enough to write proper code are generally smart enough to avoid scripting language" shows such an abject lack of understanding of the software development industry that I'm just stunned. The ones smart enough to write proper code are the ones smart enough to use the RIGHT TOOL FOR THE JOB. PERIOD.
I'm sorry for being so harsh, but I'm not sure if you're trolling or if you actually believe that crap. Frankly, I'm not sure which would be worse.
Re:Banks save nothing (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Banks save nothing (Score:5, Informative)
Companies that issue credits and/or debits see a lot of these cases, so the process is pretty well oiled.
So, my life strategy... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Banks save nothing (Score:4, Informative)
The way I understand it, the CC companies take no liability for fraudulent charges. They make the merchant that processed them pay for it. I see this as a good thing. If the merchant bears all financial liability for fraudulent charges, it gives them a reason to make sure that the person buying the product/service is who they say they are.
As a side note... can we get a -1 Idiot or -1 Wrong moderation? It would have been really useful here.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: pay off someone's cell phone? (Score:2)