December 3, 2008
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News: Made in the Shade Shady business
The black market credit card business has become, not only enormous, but stable, as well. In a recent Symantec report, we are informed that this now offers about $276 million worth of product that, along with special offers and discounts could yield around $5.3 billion in yield. That would be if all credit cards still work and could be successfully maxed out. Because the Internet is the means of choice, the business is global and borderless. There is little evidence to trace either the physical location of the vendors or their stock. This ‘intellectual property' needs no fixed storage and can be moved around the world electronically and almost instantly. Shrewd criminals have learned the techniques of fast action along with cautious methods to elude detection.
As far as their product line, the most promoted is bank account credentials. These are the most easy to convert to untraceable cash. The compromised financial accounts can easily be wire transferred in as little as 15 minutes. Secure tunnels can be employed to render all information both unreadable and untraceable by anyone on the outside. Getting back to credit cards, the ones which are matched up with the qualifying CVV2 numbers, are the second-most promoted product in the market. CVV2 codes are usually accepted by merchants for purchases where physical presence (card-present) is not plausible. CVV2 codes seem to be developing as a de facto standard for remote transactions. Their greatest value is that they're almost never stored along with other credit card information (not even on the mag strip). So they're much harder to steal and are more secure.
Other profit-enhancing factors include size of credit-limit which, of course, increase with limit size. One fairly unique advantage of fraudulent credit card account sales is scalability. It takes about the same time to sell one as it does 1,000. Not only are discounts easy to offer but, by buying bulk, the buyer has a good supply of accounts to ‘try out' If some don't work, there are always plenty more to try. Until the legitimate industry becomes more adept at closing loopholes, cyber-criminals will continue to enjoy the anonymity they get with online transactions. By using the same card number at multiple locations from multiple locations simultaneously, fraud becomes very difficult to detect immediately.