Today, a wide variety of high-tech devices are used in everyday life – cards, mobile phones and computers. New models, programs and services are constantly appearing on the market. All this makes our life more convenient, but requires certain skills and knowledge. Simultaneously with the development of such devices, there are types of fraud that make it possible to deceive and appropriate citizens’ funds. In order not to give into the tricks of intruders, it is enough to know how they work and follow the rules for using mobile phones, plastic cards and computers.
Today, counterfeiting of cards takes the leading position of all fraud types. As a rule, the issuer’s logo is applied to their blanks, the field for affixing the signature and all the security features are reproduced almost as original. The leaders on the international market in the manufacture of counterfeit cards are the representatives of Southeast Asia. Branches of criminal communities in Spain, Italy and Great Britain were also detected.
In Europe, immigrants from Africa start activating illegal business. Africans usually use counterfeit cards to get cash directly from banks. At the same time, they prove their identity using stolen ID. Africans carry out complete counterfeiting of plastic cards, most often in the United States.
Another common type of crime is illegal use of genuine plastic cards. This includes transactions with a stolen or lost card, making additional copies of payment receipts by the seller, which are then used to withdraw money from personal accounts.
There are cases when unfair employees of banks or enterprises engaged in the production of cards take advantage of the delay between opening an account and delivering the card to the owner in order to carry out transactions with it. Sometimes cardholders themselves make false statements about the alleged theft and loss of cards. It takes several days for the processing center to add the card number in the stop list and notify the retail outlets.
During this time, the owner carries out the maximum number of transactions with the card, and then presents his claims to the bank.
In practice, partial forgery of cards is often found when an attacker (most often the cardholder) changes either the number or the last name. This is done mechanically: the inscription is cut and glued. Plastic bank cards sent by mail are of particular interest to criminals. Theft is detected with great delay, as a result there is no possibility of immediate blocking of the account; by the time the cards are stolen, as a rule, they are not signed, which means that the attacker can sign and legally use the card at his own discretion. There had been cases when criminals specifically got a job at the post office or in private delivery services in order to be able to seize envelopes with plastic bank cards.
With the development of the Internet and the emergence of “online stores” it became possible to order goods by mail from a personal computer. Has the field for fraudulent transactions with plastic cards expanded in this regard?
It has expanded significantly. The fact is that it is enough to indicate the card details to pay for the ordered goods. Consequently, any information about the card may result in irreparable losses for the cardholder. Moreover, there are a great many ways to defraud the card details.
More than thirty types of fraudulent activities are carried out using the Internet.
Recently, a new type of financial fraud has appeared on the Internet – phishing, the so-called Internet fishing. The technology for fetching personal PIN-codes is quite simple. You receive an e-mail from the bank in which you keep your money, asking you to reconcile passwords and account number or update your data for one reason or another. But the bank never asks for confidential information by mail, but skillful scammers, having faked the bank’s website, send out such letters in the hope of getting to trustful customers. In such a situation, it is best to address the bank department and find out everything.
The growing number of crimes in this area threatens to undermine the credibility of cards as a reliable financial tool. However, a pessimistic view of the current situation does not at all mean that there is no way out of the current situation.
It is only necessary to attract more attention to the issues of safety of plastic cards from outside encroachments. To do this, the following measures must be taken:
Nowadays, there are reliable means of protecting computer data, but they require additional costs. We should ask a bank manager whether the bank has a security service, whether it monitors phone input and power cable? When the bankers heard these questions, which seemed to be far from the technology of money circulation, they categorically declared that all these were insignificant. Better to know all these apects beforehand.