Subscribe by EmailGenerous thieves?
July 6, 2007 by Chip | 3 comments
Symantec says that they are seeing more and more credit card numbers that have been stolen over the Internet being used to make donations to charities. The thieves make these transactions to test the card numbers for validity before using them for wider purposes.
Symantec supposes that the crooks test the water with widely known charities such as the Red Cross because banks that monitor activity will not consider a random, small donation to a charity to be an unusual type of transaction, even if the “donor” never gave to them before.
Yazan Gable, posting on the Symantec blog, said “I guess the one thing to note here though is that at least some of the stolen money is going to a good cause.” I don’t know, but I imagine the credit card company might try to charge back to the merchant once these types of transactions are discovered to be fraudulent.
- 100 Million Credit Cards Stolen in Largest Cyber Crime Ever
- Hannaford Breach Followup: Malware on All of Their Servers
- Hannaford Data Breach is Likely Much Worse Than Reported
- Muggers foiled by iPhone technology
Wow. Never underestimate the creativity of a thief.
Indeed, crime has gone high tech these days. In fact criminals only need brains and a computer. There are so many different ways of e-fraud or cloning peoples identities that I would hate to work in data security for banks or CC companies.
Robin Hood! Steel from the rich, give to the poor? Yeah, not quite. Just because you have plastic doesn’t make you rich… just in debt. I hate thieves.