Security

Cheap Stolen Credit Cards Available on Web

The credit card fraud evolves through the web

By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

23rd of November 2007, 19:26 GMT

Adjust text size:

The credit cards represent the easiest way to access your bank account and manage your funds. Because they are usually related to important amounts of money, attackers from all over the world attempted to conduct credit card fraud to steal them and obviously obtain the owner's credentials. This way, they could easily get the money deposited in the accounts.

From now on, it's only up to your imagination. But what happens with the credit cards after they are stolen? Most attackers prefer to sell them on the web and obtain money in another way than using them. Gunter Ollmann of Frequency X wrote that there are way too many websites out there attempting to sell credit cards along with owners' information such as names, addresses or social security numbers.

"It should be no surprise that there are plenty of web sites that buy and sell identity information - most of them focused on credit cards - and any quick Google searches will likely reveal many of the more popular sites. The 'better' sites tend to stay below any of the search-engine radars, and it'll take a little digging to find them (not much though). If you embark on your own investigative path, you'd better brush up on your IRC etiquette and find a good Russian-to-English translator program," Gunter Ollmann wrote in the blog post.

So, you're probably curios to find out the prices for the credit cards sold on the web. Well, don't expect to buy a single credit card because you can't, the 'merchants' preferring to sell them in packs for a higher price. For example, the same source reports that one credit card is valued at $1 if the buyer wants 1-200 pieces while the prices are decreased to $0.7 each for 2001 cards.

"For 1,000,000 cards (if you find the right supplier) this rate can drop down to $0.01-$0.1 per card. The rate depends upon how 'fresh' the cards are and how much work the seller had to go through to get hold of them," the security researcher added.

I believe it's obvious enough that you should keep your credit cards away from unauthorized eyes as the risk of stealing your information/money/credentials is pretty high.

TAGS:

credit card | security | money

SEARCH THE NEWS ARCHIVE :

Today's News | Yesterday's News | News Archive

User opinions:

No user comments yet.

Be the first to express your opinion using the form below!

Share your opinion:

SUBMIT PROGRAM \| ADVERTISE \| GET HELP \| SEND US FEEDBACK \| RSS FEEDS \| ENTER NEWS SITE \| ENGLISH BOARD \| ROMANIAN FORUM
© 2001 - 2008 Softpedia. All rights reserved. Softpedia™ and the Softpedia™ logo are registered trademarks of SoftNews NET SRL.	Copyright Information \| Privacy Policy \| Terms of Use \| Update your software \| Archive

NEWS CATEGORIES: