Visa and MasterCard Take Fight To Scammers

An anonymous reader writes "In his latest story, Brian Krebs reports on a collaboration between brand holders and credit card companies to shut down payment processing for rogue online pharmacies, pirate software sellers and fake anti-virus scams. By conducting test purchases, they map out which banks are being used to accept payments for which scams. Writes Krebs, 'Following the money trail showed that a majority of the purchases were processed by just 12 banks in a handful of countries, including Azerbaijan, China, Georgia, Latvia, and Mauritius.' These results are then fed to Visa and Mastercard who typically shut down the merchant accounts 'within one month after a complaint was lodged.' If you can't accept payments, you can't make money — and without money you can't pay the spammers who advertise your product. This effort is apparently quite effective and has led to much concern by those running such sites."

Re:Follow the money

[Anne Thwacks]

And only 10 years after I first suggested the goverment should order them to do it!

Re:Follow the money

[JustOK]

Better be careful. Once the scammer figure out you were behind this...

Re:Follow the money

[Zocalo]

Yeah, I can see the headline now: "Anne Thwacks Whacked with Anthrax!"