Fictitious Credit Cards Scam

Fictitious Credit Cards Scam

If your lofty ambition in life is to become an accomplished "Identity Thief," think of all the skills you must master: Copious listening in public. Eavesdropping everywhere. Dumpster diving. You must develop deft information-sucking tentacles, and cop

ying techniques. The art of stealth loitering around key banking terminals must be learned. You must also know how to resist the asking of too many significant questions, wherein you risk getting too many people involved in what you are doing. Challenges. Many. All formidable.

Now, apparently, the most gifted of this breed have found a way to circumvent this cumbersome job description. Short cut it. Rewrite it completely. Boil it down to a true "Lazy Man's Way" to operate.

How?

Shift operations to the back room--out of sight, shroud the whole thing in a cloak of total privacy. Create fictitious credit card numbers. This is now being done, based on the algorithms used by the card-issuing companies themselves to produce authentic numbers. Often these fake numbers are so professionally constructed that they readily pass through verification and are given approval codes.

Think of the advantages to the thief. If he / she concentrates only

on bilking businesses that operate by phone or over the internet--where digits predominate; cards are not shown--the overall possibilities for theft overflow..

So, how do such phone / internet businesses protect themselves?

Until technological means are developed, it's back to basics. Here are just a few of these we deem to be of prime importance:

Because a manufactured number could conceivably turn out to be identical to the one on your Visa, it is imperative for the thief to keep the legitimate number-holder in the dark. (This is why double addresses are so often used.) Hence, from the merchant's viewpoint, high suspicion must be focused on all "bill to" / "ship to," double-address orders. Some of the other red-light signals are orders that are larger than typical: orders requesting expedited shipping (remember, the thief could not care less about cost--he has no intention to pay anything at all); early date cards--those with long time lapses before expiration. Other than these, the standard danger lists you see prominently displayed on the internet should all be observed.

One thing going against the thief: as his recklessness and delusions of grandeur grows and spreads, technology is fast catching up. The card processors are working feverishly to solve this problem. So, bet on it: with their almost unimaginable financial resources, they will.

In the meantime, it behooves the merchant to take every "guard up" step to avoid getting caught in the stampede.
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Jack Payne is the author of the legal thriller, Six Hours Past Thursday, a fictional book about real legal scams. For more information visit www.sixhrs.com.

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