No Justice For Victims of Identity Theft 190
chicksdaddy writes: The Christian Science Monitor's Passcode features a harrowing account of one individual's experience of identity theft. CSM reporter Sara Sorcher recounts the story of "Jonathan Franklin" (not his real name) a New Jersey business executive who woke up to find thieves had stolen his identity and racked up $30,000 in a shopping spree at luxury stores including Versace and the Apple Store. The thieves even went so far as to use personal info stolen from Franklin to have the phone company redirect calls to his home number, which meant that calls from the credit card company about the unusual spending went unanswered. Despite the heinousness of the crime and the financial cost, Sorcher notes that credit card companies and merchants both look on this kind of theft as a "victimless crime" and are more interested in getting reimbursed for their losses than trying to pursue the thieves. Police departments, also, are unable to investigate these crimes, lacking both the technical expertise and resources to do so. Franklin notes that he wasn't even required to file a police report to get reimbursed for the crime: "'As long as their loss is covered they move on to [handling] tomorrow's fraud,' Franklin observes. And that makes it harder for victims like Franklin to move on, 'In some way, I'm seeking some sense of justice,' Franklin said. 'But it's likely not going to happen.'"
Is it Suicide? (Score:5, Funny)
I'd love to know if you could be charged with suicide if you kill somebody who has stolen your identity.
Anybody know?
I had this happen to me several years ago (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: I had this happen to me several years ago (Score:3)
What do you expect? The money has to be reimbursed regardless so the bank already incurred its loss at the expense of vendors and the tax payer. Pursuing these thieves costs thousands of dollars in personnel, court and lawyer costs only to find most of them cannot be traced, don't have the money to repay them or are outside of their legal jurisdiction. Unless you're talking millions, it's cheaper to take the loss and write it into their tax deduction.
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It should be the same for shoplifting. Why kill someone like Michael Brown for some cigars? Insure the loss and reinsure the insurer so they're hedged. Money is created to cover the loss, no taxes needed.
Use zero-cost funding through the Fed to give Brown a basic income so he doesn't have to steal.
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Compare to other crimes... (Score:3)
A) The loss is your time,
B) Your bank/credit company absorbs and amortizes the money stolen (only perusing it further if it makes sense financially),
C) Apart from your time (A) no property was destroyed or lost.
Compare this to a burglar who turns your home upside down, makes it impossible to assess what was lost, and then think that this burglar sells your MacBook for 10% of the asking price... Lost of property destroyed and lots of value
Same in the UK (Score:3, Informative)
Somebody stole my credit card details, almost certainly when I was visiting Cyprus, and then made several eBay purchases for in total £1700. I eventually got my money back from the credit card company, but eBay were not interested at all. One person there that I spoke to on the phone accepted that these transactions were all fraudulent and that this was a well-known type of scam, but subsequent contacts there made it clear that they were not at all interested in pursuing the fraudster. I guess £1700 is small beer to them.
I tried to report it to the ActionFraud system, run by the City of London Police Fraud Squad, but as soon as you admit that the bank refunded all your money they refuse even to issue a crime reference number. I was out of pocket over the number of phone calls I had to make, and letters to write to deny these purchases in writing, which I could not recover. The main loss, of course, was the time it took. But my case is almost certainly not reflected in any crime statistics.
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That runs slightly counter to an experience I had, which was similar but not quite the same. Someone opened an eBay account using my name and address and a fake credit card, but it wasn't my card. They bought just a couple of things, totaling less than $200. I've had collection agencies contact me a couple of times about it on behalf of eBay, who was clearly looking to recoup that relatively small loss. Not sure if they've got different policies in England as opposed to the US, or what else might have cause
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if you get to know the inside of collection agencies, you'll see why. Ebay sends bulk data on delinquent accounts to a collector, that collector then is paid purely as a percent of the money he collects for you. Ebay has 0 costs involved in this beyond sending data to the collections company. It's also why you may keep getting called for the same delinquent account.
But, beyond sending it to a collector, they aren't going to spend the time and money of their employees' to get that money. It's too expensi
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I guess £1700 is small beer to them.
It should be, especially considering that they probably just lost 61.40 British pounds [clothnappytree.com] out of the entire transaction.
The seller is probably the one who lost the rest of that amount, and then some, because they probably froze his entire account for a while after that happened.
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I had a similar experience, but eBay was able to help. They deleted the negative feedback on my account and removed all the fees. It was PayPal that couldn't be reasoned with. For years they were demanding random sums of money. I found out in the end that they converted the amount to Euros so it fluctuated with the exchange rate, by thousands of pounds.
Police were not interested. They never are, even when it's a brick through your window or hit and run.
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Your uncrackable chip-and-PIN European card got hacked how?
The real problem is... (Score:5, Insightful)
That you have an identity to steal. Our society needs to be a "lender beware" society more than relying on individuals to protect that which isn't in their power (nor the government's power) to protect. An "identity" isn't non-abstract enough to have legal meaning. I owe you money? Prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. (something they don't have to do today) Force lenders and credit card companies to take ownership of the issue, not individuals.
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What is and how do you verify "I". What is reasonable doubt? Nice terms to make a point, but the real world isn't that black and white. Too lax and those two are the reasons why banks dished out government IOUs for housing. Too strict and we have today; banks won't lend money to a person with excellent credit.
Verification and doubt reduction have costs, which are transaction costs that if too high negate the commerce path itself. The banks and credit industry have actually gotten pretty good at balanci
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actually in many countries it is that black and white, what you mean to say is "in the US where companies want the ability to mail you a credit card without doing any verification, it doesn't work".
in most countries I have lived besides the US, it takes 2-3 weeks, and 2-3 forms of separate, verified information for me to get a credit card (or open a bank account). Now that isn't representative of a majority of countries in the world, but I can at least talk about 3 other first world countries that have act
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The word you want for "non-abstract" is "concrete". Literally "pulled apart" and "stuck together" in latin.
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Excellent points AC. I'll add that we need to end using Social Security numbers as the primary identifier for all things banking, credit, and health care. SSN should only be used for dealing with the government (ie Social Security, tax filings, disability). Banking, credit, and credit reports need some other identifier that can be changed when identify theft occurs. The health care industry shouldn't be using SSN either. Using one (not easily changed) number for some many things just makes for more opp
That's partly how it should be (Score:5, Insightful)
The world at large should consider it mostly not your problem when someone opens a credit card account in your name. It should be as simple as saying "Nope, not me!", and it's actually the credit card company that has been defrauded, not you. That's why I really hate the term identity theft. I had that happen to me, and my identity wasn't stolen. I still had it. My credit card company was defrauded to the tune of a couple thousand dollars, but I was mildly annoyed and had to spend a few minutes confirming that a few purchases weren't made by me.
I think it should still be considered a criminal act, and obviously things like changing your medical record or arrest record can have very serious consequences, but it's a positive that creditors understand that when this happens, THEY have a problem. I much prefer that to them coming after me and trying to stick me with the consequences of their lax security.
Re:That's partly how it should be (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly this.Further, the various lenders and credit reporting agencies shoul;d be forced to compensate you for the time you spend fixing their screw-up for them.
Re:That's partly how it should be (Score:5, Interesting)
There's all kinds of identity theft and only some of it is credit cards. With debit cards it really is a fraud against you because your personal bank account gets debited immediately. And there's other worse identity thefts against people -- I've read stories of people losing entire retirement accounts and home equity.
I don't think that theft from people is generally taken seriously by the police, period, whether it's burglary, car theft, muggings/robbery or anything else. Pretty much all of those things don't rate with them at all and their policing policy is more like containment than actual interest in preventing it.
The police waste a huge amount of manpower and resources on stupid shit like drugs and anti-terrorism and other bullshit. If those resources went into property crimes it would go a long way towards preventing them.
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This so much! I've long thought that if I ever ran for political office, high up on my platform bullet-point list would be decriminalization of non-violent activities like drug use... and redirecting that money toward preventing and remedying violent ones, including property crime under that umbrella.
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I've heard a couple of overlapping explanations for the apparent lack of police interest in individual property crimes, especially the middle class.
One holds that tolerating a certain level of property crime against individuals encourages middle class political support for the police and law and order. Politicians sure make hay off of "tough on crime" although it's unclear whether they actually encourage the lack of police resources devoted to property crime.
The other is that the left has certain attitude
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As I see it, the victim has no special right to see the criminal punished -- except to the extent all of us do. Maybe the cops should pull a few people off the doobie squad and assign them to do some crime fighting.
Re:That's partly how it should be (Score:4, Insightful)
I had that happen to me, and my identity wasn't stolen. I still had it.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's not identity theft, it's identity copyright infringement
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It's not really copyright infringement either because the information stolen is not a creative work that copyright pertains to. Secrets are copy-protected by being secret, not by having laws against copying them.
Also, that information is not your identity; it is, at best, identifying information.
It's really just fraud, plain and simple.
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Identity fraud, or more simply, bank fraud.
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Yes, the credit card company is the defrauded entity, but you understand that they are not the ones who suffer the monetary loss. Don't you? The credit card issuer passes on the cost of the fraud to its customers in the form of account charges. Ever wonder why if you lend your money to an institution you are lucky to earn 1% interest - but if a credit card issuer lends you money, it will cost you in excess of 20%?
Some of that is waste and abuse and obscene profits. And some of it is credit card fraud.
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Ever wonder why if you lend your money to an institution you are lucky to earn 1% interest - but if a credit card issuer lends you money, it will cost you in excess of 20%?
It usually means you have a shit credit score if your credit card interest rate is over 20%.
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Seriously? Credit card lending is a horrible way to obtain funds. Its just quite stupid... on both sides. The person receiving funds can get a far better rate from a bank. The agency issuing the funds has very little recourse if you choose not to pay it back, other than tanking the credit score. For someone with bad credit, they probably don't have a credit card, but if some stupid agency provides one, that's on them. Credit card rates are mostly high because the loan is not secure and the risk is pre
Re:That's partly how it should be (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually it was the merchant which was defrauded. When you tell the credit card company that the purchase wasn't made by you, they turn around and tell the merchant to prove the purchase was made by you. If the merchant can't, the merchant eats the loss, not the credit card company. Those exorbitant interest rates credit card companies charge are to pay for deadbeats who don't pay back their credit card accounts, not fraud.
That's the real problem. The parties in control of credit card security - the credit card companies - have shifted the negative consequences of fraud onto a third party - the merchants. The merchants have a huge incentive to minimize fraud, but have no control over it other than some rudimentary tools the credit card companies provide them (you know how gas station pumps require you to enter you home zip code? That's the credit card companies' idea of "security"). Since they don't directly suffer the consequences of fraud, they've been sitting on their asses for 40 years doing nothing about it. If they'd been forced to pay for fraud, we probably would've all gotten chip and PIN in the 1980s when two-key encryption was taking off.
Anyhow, the personal cost of identity theft is clearing up your credit history afterward. You try to open up a new bank account, the bank sees all this activity and red flags on your credit report which you claim was due to identity theft, and just to be on the safe side the bank denies your new account. So in that respect it really is identity theft - someone has deprived you of the (presumably) clean credit linked to your identity and polluted it with their scummy one.
Deadbeats are not who you think they are (Score:3)
Those exorbitant interest rates credit card companies charge are to pay for deadbeats who don't pay back their credit card accounts, not fraud. (Empasis added.)
FYI: In credit card parlance, a deadbeat [creditcards.com] is someone who pays off their card every month. The people who don't pay it back are customers [citation needed!].
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The lenders would rather pay for losses than deal with the lower usage of their product that would result from making it harder to abuse.
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See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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At minimum you still need to deal with cleaning up your credit report.
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The problem is that if they make it too easy people will just claim fraud fraudulently and they will have created s new type of scam.
Irony (Score:2)
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Where is the irony? The article used the pseudonym of Jonathan Franklin.
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Where is the irony? The article used the pseudonym of Jonathan Franklin.
Mea culpa, I misread the article and thought it was a good opportunity for a joke. Fired & missed by a mile. *shrug*
Translation ... (Score:3)
Which basically says "as long as we get our money back we don't give a fuck what happens to you".
Which tells me they should be sharing some liability or they'll just keep being greedy bastards.
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What are you talking about? Credit card companies and merchants are already legally liable for fraudulent transactions and have to bear the losses. In the case of credit cards, cardholders can only be liable to up to $50 but that is almost always waived by the credit card companies.
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Credit card companies don't bear the losses in the sense you seem to think they do. The losses are simply treated as a cost of doing business, and passed on to their customers as a group - the credit card holders. To this is added the irrecoverable portion of the costs incurred by irresponsible credit card holders who don't/can't repay their debts, and the costs incurred by RESPONSIBLE credit card holders who fold due to catastrophic illness or injury, getting victimized by a bad economy, thrown into prison
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Credit card companies don't bear the losses in the sense you seem to think they do.
No, they bear it in exactly the sense I think. According to Federal Law, merchants and credit card companies can not hold me accountable to pay back fraudulent charges. That they may amortize fraud over all of their customers as a cost of business does not change that fact.
Why do you think credit card interest rates are so usurious in a time of supposedly spectacular low cost of money?
You have a shit credit score? I got all the interest rates on my two credit cards lowered to the low teens just a year or so ago.
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Low teens is still usurious.
Re:Translation ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now the part that REALLY upsets me is that it isn't even close to being feasible to report a known credit card thief!
I have enough data (50+ stores into one shipping program) between orders and chargeback reports that I can tell you full residential street names of known credit card thief. Addresses that have 2-3 chargebacks and counting. You would think with this information I could easily report it to the authorities? Nope. No easy online forms exist. If you search for them you will find they are all setup for the victim to do the reporting. It's a damn shame because though I won't have to deal with the individual scam artist(s) anymore (by now I would have blocked them with heuristics), there was an opportunity to stop them from stealing more credit cards and causing more merchants headaches.
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Wanted to add that I'm 99.99% certain of some known thief locations. When we go back to look at reports we will see sometimes 5+ chargebacks from one address. Different credit cards with different billing addresses, but same shipping address.
Anyway I don't need the doubters to believe if I'm sure enough or not, the point I want to make is that it isn't easy for me to simply report it to a tip line. At least not as easy as I wish I could be. A
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So don't loop us in with the
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I believe you. Fraud is rampant right now (in the USA, anyway) because law enforcement is totally underfunded and unable to deal with the problem. As I said in another post, this is by design, and LE in the states is focused on street crime.
Years back, someone stole a corporate Amex from my mailbox and ran up thousands of dollars in charges, including a car rental. The rental agency said they had a copy of the person's driver's license, and would provide it to the police. I filed a police report, and th
What we need is,,, (Score:3)
Specifically, we need the right to - at our option, not the government - go into the social security office and say "my identity was stolen, take my picture, DNA and finger prints, give me a picture ID social security card".
Once you have a VSS#, no one is allowed to open an account under that VSS# unless they do so in person, so the account opener can see the photo and/or finger prints match what the SSA have on file.
Obviously, this must be at the citizen's option, not the governments.
Such a system would put a hard wall up protecting victims of identity theft from further exploitation.
Re:What we need is,,, (Score:5, Informative)
No, what we need is for companies/schools/etc. to stop using a SSN as a secret identifier. Your social security card even explicitly says it is not meant to be used as such a thing.
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The honest trust is, that even if it was stopped being used like a username, it is still very easy to find out. The first 5 numbers are assigned based on birth date and location. 90% of the time you can predict it from stuff found on Facebook. The last four are supposed to be random. Which means from a set of just 10,000 facebook pages, I should easily be able to
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They don't really use SSN as a secret identifier, they use it as a NON-SECRET identifier. That is, its used like a username, not a password.
That's not true. Plenty of places I've called in to have used it as a "secret code" to verify my identity after already giving them my name, address, etc.
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Yeah, my ISP, mortgage company, phone company, etc. have all asked for the "last 4 digits" as a pass code.
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That might not be as easy as you think for people like me because I'm old enough that I didn't have to get my SSN until I needed it for a job. That means that my DOB isn't related to it, and unless I was still living fairly close to where my family lived when I was born, that's not a clue either.
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They don't really use SSN as a secret identifier, they use it as a NON-SECRET identifier.
Not really.. The SSN is supposed to be a UNIQUE KEY when coupled with your birthday.
Re: What we need is,,, (Score:2)
It's fairly trivial to get a SSN card etc issued to you, if identity thieves could also then get new SSN for themselves it will become even messier.
The government doesn't check your DNA/fingerprint when you go to the SS office. A copy of your birth certificate and a proof of address is plenty, both are easy to get even for someone else.
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Easy to get a copy only if you know the birth name, date of birth and mother and father's names.... Oh, and you have to know which county to ask and you usually need to have a good story about who YOU are if your picture ID doesn't match one of the names on the birth certificate...
I wouldn't say birth certificates are easy to get for fraudulent purposes...
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Again, trivial to get. I never needed a photo ID to get my birth certificate, I just requested one and they mailed it to me with just a photocopy of my passport.
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As said above, SSA doesn't have any sort of biometric verification of "who you are".
And, as said above, your SSN shouldn't be used as an identifier. If we need a common citizen ID number, fine, but it shouldn't be anything but identifying (i.e., effectively public knowledge).
It's the gorram 21st century. We've had public-key encryption figured out for over 30 blessed years now. Most people in the first world are carrying around several crypto smartcard devices already (EMV compatible credit cards and othe
Lock your credit reports! (Score:2)
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In the US check your state laws!!
Credit Freeze Faqs [ftc.gov]
Police don't solve crime (Score:3)
It should probably be pointed out that police aren't in the business of solving crime. Take a look at Clearance Rate.
http://www.statista.com/statis... [statista.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
In particular a choice quote from an NPR story:
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"In the '60s and '70s, no one thought that the police should be held responsible for how much crime there was," Wellford says. Back then, he adds, police focused on calls for service and solving crimes.
In more recent years, he says, police have been pushed to focus more on prevention, which has taken precedence over solving crimes — especially non-violent offenses.
In short, the falling crime rate we've enjoyed may come at a cost: police indifference when you report your stereo was stolen.
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If it's not the police's job to solve crime, then whose job is it? Apparently it's the victim's job.
Joseph Elwell.
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I forgot to link the NPR story:
http://www.npr.org/2015/03/30/... [npr.org]
The real travesty... (Score:2)
Don't fall for that one... (Score:4, Interesting)
Good luck to you when they go ahead and sell your debt to a collections agency even AFTER writing it off as a loss. They may waive the bill from your perspective but the debt doesn't go away. Once the collections agencies come after you they won't leave you alone until you show them that police report. Oh and guess what, a record was never made when they waived the debt for you so you're all on your own now.
It may be different with a credit card company, but that's exactly what happened to me with T-Mobile AND Sprint. (Yeah, yeah... fool me twice...)
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Assert your rights. For example:
"I am disputing this debt. You must verify this debt as required by the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. Because I am disputing this debt, you must not report it to the credit reporting agencies. If you have already reported it, contact the credit reporting agencies, inform them that the debt is disputed, and request that they delete it from my credit report. Reporting information that you know to be inaccurate, or failing to report information correctly, violates the
Victimless crime??? (Score:3)
Why is Identity Theft a victimless crime, but not downloading a song or a movie? The RIAA makes a big stink every time someone listens to Brittany Spears illegally, but somehow getting free merchandise in someone else's name , that's "victimless"?
Look at the rights an individual has versus a corporation. Apparently the FBI cares more about preserving the rights of a big company to make profits than it does about the average Joe.
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Yeah, there are those who feel corporations can do no wrong and any attempt to hold them accountable is government oppression of free enterprise. *cough* libertarians *cough*
What's needed are better consumer protection laws (Score:2)
Putting, banks, phone companies, etc. on the hook for losses incurred by ID theft. Then and only then will transactions and information really become secure. Right now it's pretty much a case of 'not my problem' as in 'not my problem we put your information on an unsecured web server outside of a fire wall with a publicly know and accessible DNS name'.
ID theft != victim-less crime, but profitable (Score:3)
The merchant and the card provider have to pay somebody to do the admin work, insurance companies have actuaries and risk analysis people adjusting premium rates for it, and a lot of people are employed virtually full-time processing the results of ID theft - the last company I worked at (a bank) had a team of 20 people at head office, whose sole role within the organisation was to handle ID theft issues and make sure that the message got out to the right departments and counterparties. They had nothing to do with the cancelling and reissuing of cards and so on - there is a completely separate team for that.
So ID theft is big business, not just for the thieves, but for the people cleaning up after the theft as well.
So the victim gets a few days of inconvenience every time? Ah, big deal...
However, it does depend on what is bought with the stolen CC details. Consider the scenario where that person's credit card details are used to purchase access to a kiddie porn site. Maybe nobody notices the details have been lost, until the police come busting down his door after raiding the ISP for the provider and finding his details. Before it is verified that the card details were stolen, he gets smeared across some tabloid rag as a child molester, and his personal and professional reputation is destroyed. Even once the "oh, oops, the CC details were stolen, looks like he might not be a kiddie rapist after all" message drops, not everyone will hear it, and his life becomes hell.
Or the guy who finds that his CC details were used to buy a kilo of weed. He is not going to be too popular with his manager at work, although the guys in IT support will definitely want to be friends until they realize he didn't actually buy.
But...he got reimbursed? (Score:2)
So he got all his money back, they just never caught the person? My old housemate from University was a victim of identity theft and even after going through all his records and fighting with the bank, he still ended up being out about $3k! He worked in a grocery store and was a history major so that was *a lot* of money for him.
In this case this person got all his money back correct? I can understand wanting the person who did this brought to justice (I mean I'm sure it was weeks of paperwork and such to r
Re:Get over it (Score:5, Insightful)
Having your space violated, either physical or online, is not always easy to get over. If your house is broken into and someone steals your TV, fine...you get a replacement TV. But you still feel 'violated'.
Re:Get over it (Score:4, Informative)
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I've had my credit card information stolen maybe 5 times (probably from a hacked website as I never lost my card.) The first time somebody used it to buy 6 months of yahoo personals, donated $50 to some cancer charity, and what sent the red flag was when they tried to buy some kind of big sports thing from ESPN for about $800.
The whole ordeal didn't cost me anything except for the inconvenience of going a week without my card.
I couldn't care less about ESPN or yahoo's misfortunes, but I suspect the cancer c
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I'm sure Mastercard's insured. I bet no one loses money. The private sector creates money out of the hot air they use to make promises to themselves.
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It's not much different
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Re:Get over it (Score:5, Informative)
Every time you pay for dinner at a restaurant with your credit card, you're giving your waiter everything they need to steal your identity, especially if they ask to see your ID before serving you alcohol. Credit cards were designed in the pre-internet era. It blows my mind that we haven't moved on to something more secure.
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Credit cards were designed in the pre-internet era. It blows my mind that we haven't moved on to something more secure.
We haven't moved on from credit cards because most people will resist change.
Recently in Australia we elimination signing for purchases (a major source of fraud) so everyone who used to sign now has to use a PIN. Banks were flooded with calls complaining that using a PIN was too hard and if they had a choice they'd keep signing.
It takes at least 25 years for any new technology to integrate itself into our lives. For early adopters this may seem like a long time, but for the laggards its not enough tim
Re:Get over it (Score:4, Insightful)
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Cash has limited scope. I need to carry about $500 with me for cash incidentals most of the time, despite 75% of my spending being via credit card. I used to be fine with 90% cash and under $200 on my person, but that was a decade ago.
The only thing I can do to manage risk is placing things in corporations.
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Chip and Pin is fairly standard here in South Africa. Even the cheapest savings account with a noname local bank gives you chip and pin. We still have the fallback to magnetic strip though. We also have two step authentication where you get a sms with a pin when you buy something online, though I see it doesn't happen for steam, which is a bit scary.
I had my identity stolen here, but they did not use my credit card. Instead they used a (very obviously) fake ID to get a cell phone contract. It was a mission
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I've had my credit card information stolen maybe 5 times (probably from a hacked website as I never lost my card.)
I almost guarantee it was stolen from physically using it rather than a hacked website. You know when you pay for a meal at a sit down restaurant and they take the card into the back? All they need to do is photograph both sides of the card and they have all the info they'll ever need to go on an amazon shopping spree. If they wanted to get slightly more risky, they could carry in a magstripe reader (the electronics are tiny now, it could fit in a pocket no problem) and use that to make perfect clones of th
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I almost guarantee it was stolen from physically using it rather than a hacked website. You know when you pay for a meal at a sit down restaurant and they take the card into the back?
Actually at the time that this happened, I hadn't ever used a credit card to pay for a meal in this manner (I was always eating fast food back then, and the card never left my posession.) I have recently though, but haven't had any incidents of unauthorized use recently either.
It could even be stolen via someone putting a skimmer over the magreader and keypad at a gas station. I've seen pictures of the things in action.
No chance of that. I have a separate card I use for gas, and it hasn't ever been compromised.
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TFA addressed that. Eventually that "lock down" is lifted and you let your guard down. Cyber criminals have figured that out, and will wait months or years to reuse or resell your information. In this case, they have the guy's SSN, so they can just wait for the locks to come off his credit to apply for more credit cards in his name.
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Unless you count the hours of his life he wasted working out what the heck went on and fixing his financial information. I've heard fo people fighting for years trying to get things like credit ratings fixed.
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yep, I had a citibank issued card years ago. And a couple months after canceling it someone got hold of the info (didn't fish it out of the trash, I hold all old cards for quite a while before dumping them) and started charging it.
Citi had a rule that even though it is a canceled card, if any charges come in during the next 3 months, they will automatically reactivate the card. well a few months later I got a letter saying I was months behind and when I called, they said this was standard policy. When I
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The companies are hedged, I bet. Insured. I bet no one loses any money. The insurance companies reinsure and profit no matter what happens.
Why even prosecute shoplifters? Physical stores should get the same kind of insurance.
Michael Brown should have been let off, not even chased. No one loses money because the finance industry creates money out of thin air to cover all losses.
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The companies are hedged, I bet. Insured. I bet no one loses any money. The insurance companies reinsure and profit no matter what happens
No. A bank is not going to be insured against these kind of small day-to-day losses. That would make no sense, since they would pay more for the insurance, than they would receive in reimbursements. As much as possible, the bank tries to push the losses onto the merchant, which is often legitimate since the merchant is responsible for checking that the CC actually belongs to the holder. If you have been shopping in the last few decades, you would know that that is rarely done, but for big purchases, lik
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Banks are fully hedged. When Goldman Sachs stood to lose a few billions because AIG was the victim of a groupthink market panic so they couldn't roll over their loans, the Fed stepped in to reimburse Goldman Sachs. And AIG is still around, I see their upbeat commercials on TV all the time. So who really lost money? Money was created. The private sector creates tens, or hundreds, of trillions of dollars a year.
Re:Boo Hoo (Score:5, Insightful)
Banks are fully hedged. When Goldman Sachs stood to lose a few billions ...
Just because they were bailed out on billions, it does not follow that they are going to get a bail out for a thousand dollar credit card fraud.
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I think of it more as "death by a few billion cuts" followed by the government using a phoenix down on them.
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Are you sure that Apple suffered a loss in this case? I really doubt they were charged back. The companies are all insured, and the insurers reinsure to hedge. Basically money is created to cover the losses. Shh though, don't tell the Quantity Theory of Money people, their heads will explode.
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