An online credit card scam that stole millions of dollars was halted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. The online credit card scam used identity theft to steal small amounts of money that went undetected by consumers or fraud detectors. Over four years, a lot more than a million individuals were charged anywhere from 25 cents to $ 9 on their credit cards in a scam that added up to be a lot more than $ 10 million.



Post resource: Online credit card scam stole millions, pennies at a time by Personal Money Store



Those who were victims didn’t even notice



The elaborate online credit card scam operated undetected because scammers made very small charges and set up a lot more than 100 bogus companies to process the transactions. It was reported by PC World that U.S. credit card holders financed the majority of the scam because about 94 percent of all charges went uncontested by the victims of identity theft. FTC reports the scammers charged 1.35 million credit cards a total of $ 9.5 million, but only 78,724 of these fake charges were ever noticed. Typically they made just one charge per card number to fake business names such as Adele Services or Bartelca LLC. Avivah Litan, who is an analyst with the Gartner research firm who follows bank fraud, told PC World:



"They know that the majority of the fraud detection systems won't detect anything under $ 10 and they know that consumers won't complain about a 20 cent fee. What's different here is the scale, and that they got away with it for so numerous years."



Credit card fraud trends



The online scam is a textbook case about how online services used to facilitate business in the 21st century can be exploited for credit card fraud. As credit cards are getting used a lot more and a lot more for inexpensive purchases--they're now accepted by soda machines and parking meters--credit card fraud criminals have cashed in on the trend. It was reported by IDG News Service that the scammers found loopholes in the credit card processing system that allowed them to set up fake U.S. companies that then ran more than 1 million fake credit card transactions through legitimate credit card processing companies. First Data was one of the favorite scammers. Of the 116 fake merchant accounts the FTC uncovered, 110 were with First Data. They also set up bogus accounts with Elavon.



Uncertain is the real source of all the identity theft



The FTC believes the defendants might have run credit checks on the identity theft victims to be sure they were creditworthy. The FTC doesn't know where the scammers obtained the credit card numbers they charged, but they could have been purchased from online carder forums, black market Web sites where criminals buy and sell stolen info.



Credit card scam that is online seems like a textbook case



To create the virtual infrastructure for the online credit card scam, Webpronews teaches us the scammers set up some fake physical addresses and fake web websites pretending to sell products, along with a real company's tax number found online. Scammers then sent out spam e-mail pretending to recruit American finance managers for some of the offshore financial service companies. Those people who were selected by the scammers were persuaded to set up dummy corporations to receive the credit card payments and send the money to bank accounts in Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Cyprus and Kyrgyzstan.



Discover a lot more about this topic here:



PC World


IDG News service


Webpronews