January 08, 2009
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News: Beware of the Phish Net.
Although the term ‘phishing' may not be in everyone's vocabulary yet, the concept is more universally understood. Someone would like to snoop around in your personal information in order to steal something from you. Today, one of the most prolific areas where this is going on is with credit cards. There are weasels who work night and day at searching for ways to steal our sensitive credit card information with the intent to steal whatever they can from us. Masked behind the ruse of being legitimate businesses, scams abound today in the credit card industry as never before.
Reports come in every day around our country of scams where honest and unsuspecting victims are solicited under the guise of something good and upright in order to get into their confidences. The solicitations can come in the forms of advertisements, e-mails and official requests for security purposes to gather information, designed to gather secure credit card information. The first level of the enterprise is the easiest – getting a person's card number in the first place is the easy part. Scummers with skimmers are readily available and clerks anywhere can take an extra swipe of victims' cards all day long for later upload after work. But, with our improved securities, only having the credit card number isn't worth as much as it used to be.
Right now, the highest valued stolen credit cards in this country must deliver things like their 3-digit CVV2 (Card Verification Value) code. This is the number found on the back of the card, usually found on the right end of the ‘Signature Pad'. These codes allow for ‘non-present' card transactions where neither the thief not the card have to be physically present in order to make the transaction (like e-bay and other on-line purchases). Valued at 16% of sales, the only higher percentage is for direct bank account information at 18%. Bank accounts are worth more because cash is clean and harder to trace. For detailed advice on how to protect yourself, please take a few minutes and read the article series entitled "Don't Get Trapped in the Phish Net".