Jason Nadal

Restless C#ding

RE: Credit Card Fraud

Things like this are all too common these days, and it seems that AOL is the usual first false charge. I wonder if this is really a matter of stealing card information, or rather if the card numbers are being randomly generated by a number generator or something? You would think there would be more protection for things like this, but social engineering is tough to protect against.

My wife was hit by credit card fraud last week - somehow, someone managed to get her credit card number and used it to make charges to

  • AOL - setting up an email account in my wife's name that even used our actual address, phone number etc.

After a call to the credit card company, my wife's card was quickly blocked and the illegal charges were refunded to us, but despite the fact that we did not lose any money, things like this do make you wonder how secure credit cards really are, especially when used on-line.

[Via Luke Hutteman]

Comments

denny said:

I have no clue what they do today but....

back in say 94-96 time frame I knew some of the AOHell gangs... they had a set of apps witten In VB (6 ?was that it?)
that basicaly could control the AOL client app.
it would send messages, create chat rooms and swap warez in all kinds of scary ways...

part of that culture was to do this:

run a CC # generating app, use that to create a "30 day free trial" account, then 3 weeks later create a new account and cancel the old one.

result was they used many screen names every year and never kept an account open for more than 30 days.... they would have a "Legit" account also and used it only to keep in touch with others....

kinda like a "Floating craps game" so to speak.

I'm sure with the junk we see today that kind of deal still goes on....

and I would love to see how many "real" accounts AOL has and how many fake ones like I just desribed?

PS: CC account numnbers follow a well known pattern. easy to fake. and like the lotto someone always wins. :-)
# June 28, 2004 10:20 PM

Jason Nadal said:

I would think that would really press the issue for single-use credit card numbers. A few companies already offer them. (AMEX is the one that comes to mind). The bad part about that is it gets people paranoid about using their CC online, even though that's probably the safest place it could be used!
# June 28, 2004 10:23 PM
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