The Notable Decline of Identity Fraud 130
Orome1 writes "In 2010 the number of identity fraud victims decreased by 28 percent to 8.1 million adults in the United States, three million fewer victims than the prior year. Total annual fraud decreased from $56 billion to $37 billion, the smallest amount in the eight years of the study. While overall fraud declined, consumer out-of-pocket costs rose significantly, mainly due to the types of fraud that were successfully perpetrated and an increase in "friendly fraud." The number of identity fraud incidents decreased by 28 percent over the past year, which brought them down to levels not seen since 2007. The mean fraud amount per victim declined from $4,991 in 2009 to $4,607."
Unemployment & Economy (Score:3, Insightful)
Thieves have a good chance of stealing the identity of someone that is probably worse off than them.
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you still get something for nothing
Not true.
Whatever they get costs them time, effort, and risk. If the reward isn't large enough, it's not worth it.
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Almost all criminals do less well financially than if they'd simply got a normal job and stuck with it, even ignoring the fact that they are bound to spend quite a lot of time in prison.
As a rule, they take the easy option regardless of consequences.
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I think they do (at least informally) estimate the risks and benefits of each job that they do, I also think that one of the keys is that they are really bad at it.
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Do you think criminals operate like actuaries, and produce a risk/benefit analysis for each job they do?
Indvidually, no. As a group? Kind-of. In the sense that the occasional ID thieve looks at his take on a theft and decides 'meh, not worth trying again'.
Easier to go steal the copper out of forclosed homes.
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As a rule, they take the easy option regardless of consequences.
Precisely why making crime more difficult is often a pretty good deterrent.
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I can imagine the RIAA using this...
Spend all your money with the RIAA and identity fraud is reduced
or just using the correlation to link downloaders with identity theft.
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Crime is caused by poverty? Whoda thunk it?
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So all those rich people who find ways to evade taxes are poor?
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Right, because when I was talking about crime I clearly meant all of those executives and their offshore accounts. If only they were richer; they'd stop dodging their taxes!
It should have been pretty obvious, but either I failed at that or you're being pedantic, so I'll state it more plainly:
Crimes perpetrated by poor or average income persons (excluding crimes of passion) is caused by not having enough money? Whoda thunk it?
Re:Unemployment & Banking (Score:1)
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Most identity theft involves opening new credit lines. Guess what? Banks don't give new credit lines anymore. Folks are stuck with whatever existing credit lines they have.
Not worth it (Score:2)
With the mean amount per victim so (relatively) low, I guess it's just not worth it for the criminals doing it on an individual basis. All the rational criminals must be moving to more lucrative sources of ill-gotten gains.
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All the rational criminals must be moving to more lucrative sources of ill-gotten gains.
Congress? We did have mid-term elections a few months ago in 2010 - when this crime dropped. Coincidence? I don't think so!
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All the rational criminals must be moving to more lucrative sources of ill-gotten gains.
Congress? We did have mid-term elections a few months ago in 2010 - when this crime dropped. Coincidence? I don't think so!
Entering politics certainly is a more lucrative sources of ill-gotten gains, and attracts many criminals.
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Power attracts the corruptible.
Re:Not worth it (Score:5, Insightful)
All the rational criminals must be moving to more lucrative sources of ill-gotten gains.
Like finance.
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I think your numbers are probabally reasonable for a phishing scam, but the parent's comment was highly targeted attacks on individuals. This seems less likely unless they know they stand to gain at least 10x the average. Random only goes so far.
I'm just optimistic that there is a hair of consumer insight into what is going on, and they are being ever so slightly more careful. I can dream.
Hrm (Score:4, Insightful)
Coincidentally, I don't get offers of free credit in the mail from EVERY bank in the United States anymore either. Wonder if that could have anything to do with it.
Re:Hrm (Score:4, Informative)
Coincidentally, I don't get offers of free credit in the mail from EVERY bank in the United States anymore either. Wonder if that could have anything to do with it.
Check your credit report... did you know you now own three trucks in .MX and a condo in Vegas? Seriously one of the best indications of theft is an unanticipated change in your junkmail.
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I lived in Las Vegas for years, you better be lying.
Actually, I could tell you some interesting stories about identity fraud in Vegas. Had a roommate who had her mail stolen and someone ran up a lot of charges on cards she never registered for.
The neighbor down the street had someone take out a loan from a bank on his house without his knowledge. There were some pros running around back when I was there.
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Had a roommate who had her mail stolen and someone ran up a lot of charges on cards she never registered for.
The neighbor down the street had someone take out a loan from a bank on his house without his knowledge.
Ah, its like that everywhere in the country not just Vegas.
The roommate thing is slightly easier to detect, I used to get exactly two junkmails per week, every week, for many years, from Crapital One, they must have spent hundreds of dollars over the years on postage trying to make me a customer. So if I would only get one ad from Crapital One, I'd get nervous. The neighbor thing is way tougher because I got about one refinance offer per day, but from a different bank each day... how anyone ever know if o
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OT: What's really fun is taking all the extra fluff Crapital One sends you (fake credit card, terms of service, etc... that does not have your name/address of course) and stuffing it in the bulk prepaid envelop they include and send it back to them. The more you stuff in there the more it costs them in postage to have it sent back.
Any junk mail I get that includes a prepaid reply envelop gets this treatment. Just my way of saying thank you for wasting my time...
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OT: What's really fun is taking all the extra fluff Crapital One sends you (fake credit card, terms of service, etc... that does not have your name/address of course) and stuffing it in the bulk prepaid envelop they include and send it back to them. The more you stuff in there the more it costs them in postage to have it sent back.
Any junk mail I get that includes a prepaid reply envelop gets this treatment. Just my way of saying thank you for wasting my time...
What's really, REALLY fun is attaching the prepaid reply label to a concrete breeze block, or a tub of rotting jellied eels, or a Wolverine... ;)
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If everyone did this, it might save the post office and eventually reduce the amount of junk mail. All on Capital One's dime!
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How the hell ? (Score:1)
Identity fraud is nearly non-existent here in France. All credit cards have pin numbers and taking credits requires the use of state-manufactured ID. IDs are very hard to fake and use of fake ID is harshly punished (relatively to other property crime that is, our judiciary system is globally lenient). Paper checks are discouraged and ID is mandatory for using them anyway.
Just make banks liable for losses and they will make sure it doesn't happen very very fast.
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I don't know how it stands legally in the US, but lots of places I've seen have signs saying it's company policy to ask for ID when you make a credit card purchase. I've been asked to show my ID once, ever, for a credit card purchase (oddly, at a place I frequent regularly, and the cashier more than likely knew me by sight). It's just too much of a hassle to check it for every customer that comes through, I suppose.
I do get asked for ID when I buy things with checks—although the only time I write ch
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On a sidenote: Damn, still no numbers in an ol.
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This.
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Banks are liable for losses on credit card purchases. If you see unauthorized charges on your bill, you can refuse to pay it (granted, I think you have to notify them in a somewhat timely manner, and other reasonable restrictions probably apply).
Debit card purchases, not so much. If they had your PIN, you're screwed. If they used it without a PIN, it was technically a credit card purchase so the bank is actually supposed to be liable for it, but unlike a credit card purchase, the money has already left your
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You might be surprised at what a creditor can get away with if they believe you owe them money. They can't send somebody to beat you up every month, but they can still make your life pretty miserable.
Yeah, they'd have to prove it was you in order to force you to pay. But you have to prove it wasn't you in order to force them to stop trying to collect...
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Merchants are liable for losses, not the banks. The banks have a great scam going.
Bank liability is one part of the equation, but access to credit is the other part. Chip and Pin only solves the actual credit card fraud portion. The liability in Europe's system is actually placed on the consumer, so with Chip and Pin, you don't have recourse to say it wasn't you making the purchase. If they crack that system, you are SOL.
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Good point. Yeah, the bank is liable - but they'll just charge back the seller. And they get to keep their 3% fee (or whatever it is).
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Just make banks liable for losses and they will make sure it doesn't happen very very fast.
Well it USED to be that if someone ROBBED A BANK, that the bank was liable. Somehow this got turned around and now its stealing YOUR IDENTITY, rather than ROBBING A FUCKING BANK.
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Both the article and Slashdot summary do a good job of calling it fraud instead of theft. So a step in the right direction.
What the... (Score:1)
Spam levels dropping, less identity fraud... It's all about censorship and connecting to twitter through smoke signals nowadays.
Give me back my internets!!
The economy hits everyone hard. (Score:1)
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Or it could be AOL users dying off.
Well, that's good new, but . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
A colleague of mine was a victim; it's a royal pain in the ass to get straightened out. The perpetrator somehow got a hold of his Social Security number, and got a credit card in my colleague's name at either Lowe's or Home Depot (building suppliers, for the non US folks). The perpetrator maxed out the card in one day. Since the crook gave a false address, my colleague never got the bill. So it wasn't paid, and this set off some sort off nuclear credit chain reaction which blocked all his credit cards. When he finally figured out what happened, it took him weeks to get it all right again. So the money is the smallest problem. It's the collateral damage that is the big problem.
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Your system sounds like lenders trying to cover their own asses. Which makes sense, but it's a trade off.
It's in Lowe's best interest to make it easy for people to get credit. Nobody wants to bring in their passport or birth certificate to get $150 credit on a refrigerator.
The drawback is that anybody flaunting the correct 9-digit number can get money that traces back to you, but the system is designed in such a way that you can get it straightened out. It's just a big hassle, as PolygamousRanchKid said. An
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In my case, they got my SSN, name, DOB and address, but had my mother's maiden name wrong. The credit card company ("cough*Capital One*cough*) approved the card despite this and even let them change the address on the card before it was activated. Luckily for me, the thieves paid for rush shipment of the card and it went out before the address change took effect. So the card came to me and I was able to stop the damage from this incident before anything major took place.
Still, I now know that my private
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Your name, date of birth and address are not private. Your mother's maiden name is not private. Your SSN is perhaps semi-private.
So the reason someone has access to that information is that it is stored in many databases, rather than being private.
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Your name, date of birth and address are not private. Your mother's maiden name is not private.
^--- THIS! If you google the name of any non-celebrity in the United States, there is MORE than just results from Facebook and LinkedIn. Companies digitize city databases and then dozens of freeloaders scrape and repost those with your city, approximate age and the names of suspected family members --that's free.
This all comes from records with your landlord if you rent, or home purchase records. Back 20 years you had to leave a trail by going to courthouses and other government agencies, but getting it
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Still, if a credit card company is requiring Mother's Maiden name as a security question and the applicant gets it wrong (and not just typo wrong but completely and totally wrong), why would they approve the application? You would think that would raise a fraud alert in their systems.
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I say screw the store. Sorry, but if you are willing to lend thousands of dollars somebody you do not know except from a short conversation, it should be your loss.
Every credit card should have a delay and you must send in a confirmation from a received statement before it goes online. I would be fine with having that procedure. The idea I must open a line of credit TODAY or I die is a big reason for this problem. Stores love it, I am sure, but it should be their risk.
Credit card issuers should have this be
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Yeah, well - it is the store's loss. You can get things straightened out and have the debt taken off your account and get the credit report fixed, but that takes time and is a big hassle.
However it would also be a hassle if Home Depot or Lowe's made every person who wanted in-store credit show a birth certificate or passport. They take a calculated risk by not doing so.
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Still, it shouldn't result in a hassle for me when Lowe's issues a credit card to someone else.
People that have never been caught cheating should be able to (fully!) repudiate an account by sending a simple form letter to the party that issued the credit. Once someone has been caught cheating, they should still be able to repudiate an account, but it should take more than a letter saying it they are not the party that opened the account.
That this would require issuers of credit to take reasonable steps to c
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Shouldn't, but it would be awfully easy for debtors to abuse the system if a simple form letter was all that was required to get them off your back.
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Of course any realization of it would have to account for bad actors, it just has the advantage of punishing bad actors for actual bad actions rather than punishing uninvolved third parties for having a name.
Also, lenders would be able to anticipate fraudulent letters when designing their identity verification, so it should be fairly straightforward for them to demonstrate that a letter is fraudulent.
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I wish you had to opt in to simple credit approvals, instead of struggling to opt out. I do not want anybody to get a credit card in my name without a serious check on their identity, including me! It is just so irritating that it is so easy.
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Does the judge hearing the case have credit cards? (Score:2)
More importantly; Does his wife?
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The credit agencies have tons of cash to pay top notch lawyers to defend themselves and lobbyists to write laws in their favor. Even if a group of ID theft victims pooled their resources, I don't think they'd get much beyond a token settlement.
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In my experience Home Depot / Lowe's tend to give out insanely high limits on their cards, usually in the five digit range depending on what you buy. Shafting a chain hardware store for 25 grand tends to draw a little more ire than shafting Best Buy for a laptop and a stereo.
If you get a card from one of them, pay it off and cancel it. At one point, over a third of my 'available credit' was on one of their cards.
The reason (Score:2)
These days, the victims don't have any money to steal. Just debts, and most thieves don't want to steal that!
Yay (Score:1)
Here's what pisses me off (Score:4, Funny)
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WTF, the identity thief's right to privacy now trumps the cardholder's right to go there and kick their ass?
Um, no... you don't have the right to go take the law into your own hands... but I'm pretty sure they'd comply with a police investigation.
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You would think they would. The credit card company my local police dealt with in my case just gave them the runaround though until we all gave up. They have more resources than local law enforcement and they know it. They might pay attention to the Feds, but the federal government's not going to open an investigation for each and every case of identity theft/fraud.
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Because the banks are corrupt first, and asshats at their core second.
If you do not have millions in the bank then you are a bother to them and they honestly want you gone.
Honestly, all banks have meetings in the morning on how they can screw the customers today.
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Nooooo they simply do not know that she is who she says she is. Look at it from their perspective, someone calls them, feeds them a story, and then tries to gain information that could aide in the commision of identity theft. It is an annoying catch-22 but there you have it. It does eventually get rectified and believe it or not there are ways to deal with it without getting the information, it just means being creative.
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Some company with a TAX ID equal to my father's SSN* had credit issues, so a random bank posted a stop to his SSN that got him in trouble with his own bank. We went to the random bank, where they realized the problem but would not reveal the client's information because we weren't the real consumer. They corrected it quickly.
However, with fraud the company authenticates you based on proof of ID, security questions and weighing the location-based activity that "proves" you are the original owner. The catch i
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Typically a thief will have it delivered to a neighbor and then pick it off their porch as soon as it is dropped off... not sure what you were planning to do with the address.
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Because banks are profiting from fraud (Score:1)
Someone stole my credit card and used it to purchase crap on the internet and get it shipped to me. Why to me? Because the fraudsters got a kick back on the sale for the referral.
I noted something interesting. The packages for me arrived at my house thanks to USPS, but they had the wrong address.
I called the vendors who charged my credit card and shipped the merchandise, and I learned a few interesting things.
1. The vendors did not have my correct address or phone number, yet my credit card company allow
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Had this same thing happen to me this last year, actually. I didn't ask for the address, but I did call the police to file a police report. Their response was "Why are you calling us?" They filed a report but said it was useless. Thing is, I check my credit cards every freaking day. I caught that at 8am the day AFTER it happened. It probably hadn't even shipped yet. That would have made for a great stake out. It just made me feel like the law enforcement was being lazy (though they may have had more
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I don't think it is that law enforcement is lazy. It's that they're (sadly) realistic. The officer I spoke with in my case told me that if we found out that the criminal in question was in another city or state, they would need to turn the case over to that precinct. That precinct would then have to track the criminal down, arrest him, try him (if you needed to testify, you'd have to travel there). Your local police department would have done some work but wouldn't see the outcome. They, unfortunately,
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When my identity was stolen and used to open a credit card, Capital One told me they couldn't give me the address because I might go there and shoot the person and then they'd be liable! So I referred the police to them. Then they gave the police the runaround as well. Eventually, we just gave up on finding the thieves and focused on securing our credit file.
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IANAL but to me that sounds like the credit card company is being an accomplice to the crime by not divulging the location of the criminal. Of course, if you're not liable for the charges then nothing has actually be stolen from you.
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Somebody used my wife's credit card number to buy merchandise and ship it to an address on the opposite coast. So she called up the credit card company and asked them what address was used. They refused to give it to her, citing privacy concerns! WTF, the identity thief's right to privacy now trumps the cardholder's right to go there and kick their ass?
You are pretty thick headed aren't you?
You said it yourself. SHE CALLED THE CARD COMPANY UP. So how the fuck are they really going to know it's her? She's talking to them on the telephone. Not much different then what the person did who got access to your wife's card.
You so missed the point it's funny.
Framing the question: Credit Fraud, not Identity (Score:4, Insightful)
While "Identity Fraud" is a step up from "Identity Theft", it still poses it as a problem of the victim. In car theft, you are out one car. Did you leave it unlocked? Did you park in a bad side of town? It's somewhat your problem.
In "Identity Theft", you are often nowhere near the crime, or really had no way to stop it. Underpaid waiter writes down your visa number and expiration date while you pay your bill - bam! Someone calls the bank knowing your mother's maiden name and your grade school - bam!
Yet somehow, it's your fault.
Identity fraud is better - someone has been busy defrauding people - it's not you. By moving it away from the word 'theft' to 'fraud', it puts people in a different frame of mind, like forgery and such where the victim really has no chance of stopping it from happening.
But: identity fraud is still different from credit fraud, and the press seems to like lumping them together. We already have laws on the books for when someone defrauds a bank claiming to be you, yet the current debate and billing systems still put it in YOUR lap. As soon as we get a good consumer lobbyist in place, we'll get the laws changed to make the banks take responsibility when someone lies to them, instead of you being responsible for cleaning up the mess.
Ok, that last one was a bit of a fantasy. Sorry about that.
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Why are you telling the waiter your mum's maiden name
Re:Framing the question: Credit Fraud, not Identit (Score:4, Insightful)
With so many children born out of wedlock and divorces theres good chances that someones mothers maiden name is their current last name.
Mother's maiden name = password (Score:2)
It's a just a password, and I've been using a arbitrary uncommon name since they started asking dozens of years ago.
a) I don't want you to know anything about my mother
b) I know they don't care to check because no one has... it's just a password.
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Plenty of people advertise that kind of information on Facebook. You can even indicate who your parents are on there. And they made it so if you get married you can still list your previous name so people can search for it.
While people are dumb for publicly giving that kind of information away (at least set your profile to private!); banks and other financial institutions should also have more rigorous security questions. Even better is what I've seen some sites do where instead of having 5-8 predefined sec
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Why are you telling the waiter your mum's maiden name
It's very very easy to find out someone's mother's maiden name just from public records [psu.edu].
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Maiden name's not really needed. A thief (and yes, I think of him/her as a thief) opened an account in my name using my name, address, SSN and date of birth. They got my mother's maiden name wrong, but the credit card company still approved the (online) application and sent them the card. Luckily, they used my address and then tried to update it and the card went to me instead of them. Otherwise, they would have activated it, maxed it out and stuck me with the bill.
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Actually, one of the more common cases in the credit fraud is among relatives. One person in a family has decent credit, and another member - not so good. Siblings are somewhat common, while aunts and cousins are less so.
Having data that's part of public record being made into the 'secret question' is pretty bad. Some questions aren't so public (like 'where did you meet your spouse?'), but the whole system is based off of the ability to start these lines
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Why don't american payment-systems have any security ?
Why are credit-cards still set up so that anyone you've ever paid to with the card, has all the info they need to charge the card. (card-number and expiration-date)
It's stupid, and it's useless.
When I pay by card in a restaurant here, I do it by inserting a chip-card into a (often hand-held) terminal. The terminal does challenge-response to validate the card, and requires a 4-digit pin in addition.
Thus the waiter, even if he saw you enter the pin, would
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Fair enough, but it's not as if it's less convenient paying by card here, infact Norwegians pay by card a whole lot MORE than Americans, partly as a result of convenience.
It's not a hassle to do: "insert, enter-pin, wait ~2s, withdraw" a card. In fact paying by card is significantly faster than paying cash here since the latter typically involves giving change etc.
Online, it's *slightly* more of a hassle, but still no biggie. What happens there (since I can't prove physical posession of the card online), is
Still pretty prevalent on IRC, though (Score:2)
* ab is away - gone, if anyone talks in the next 25 minutes as me it's ba being an asshole -
[ab] HAHAHA DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS
http://bash.org/?5775 [bash.org]
Less stupid as time goes on (Score:2)
I guess it means we are all getting a bit smarter and wiser to the different schemes out there...although there are still some that would believe that if you send them some money in nigeria their royalty family will be able to send you mountains of money.
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Last month at my doctor's office elderly ladies mentioned some company had mailed one a contest entry form that she was excited about. I mentioned the Nigerian scamming, and international mules and check fraud, but they weren't completely sure that the company was trying to scam them. The lure was to guess "what ONE country has no letter A in its name" to win a lot of cash.
It was a language different to English, since Egipt, Mexico and Puerto Rico came to mind in a couple minutes, I told them nobody legit s
28% drop (Score:1)
Isn't that roughly the same amount that spam has dropped by recently..?
Friendly fraud?? (Score:2)
Lifelock works?!?!?! (Score:2)
Maybe Lifelock is finally working?!?!
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As a European recently moved to the Americas I'm frequently baffled by the procedures of identity verification.
How do you allow businesses (whom run the government) to profit by the presence of somewhere in the magnitude of 1e7 illegal aliens, yet not open the system too wide for theft?
Also note that a fraction of the "theft" is actually fraud, and how do you set up procedures to catch at least some of the fraud. Yes thats all very terrible when someone has to spend X hours of their life cleaning up a $Z "theft". Now would you accept $Y in cash, where $Y/X is some multiple of your hourly wage, to ...
Given those tw
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In Europe we have hard to fake Government issued IDs for everyone.
No we don't. Lots of Europeans don't have government issued IDs.
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I repeat: when I complained that the question they just asked me was meaningless as a method of identity verification they agreed and offered me, at that point an unverified individual, to lock the account down with a password. Good job.
Well, if you were posing as someone else, you wouldn't have bothered to complain about security. So there's a good chance you're the real customer.