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Dead-Man
Walking
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Today
we hear and read a lot about privacy. As our industry and our world
becomes more technologically savvy, concerns about our financial
information and how secure it is seem to be on everyone’s minds. But,
while we’ve been worried about the Internet, merchant records, and
encryption, we may be overlooking one threat: the common, garden-variety
criminal. The following is an example of credit card fraud which has
little to do with technology. A
28-year-old Mississippi man, whose business provided credit assistance,
has been arrested for obtaining and using credit cards in the names of his
customers, as well as deceased individuals. The scam may go back as far as
four years and it is suspected that as much as $3 million in credit card
fraud was perpetrated in the scam. When
authorities went to the man’s home to arrest him, they found a number of
interesting items including: 1. credit
cards in other people’s names, 2.
newspaper clippings of the obituaries; some of the names matched those on
the credit cards, 3. credit
reports in other people’s names. It
is believed the scam artist used as much information as he could glean
from the obituaries and then requested further public information, such as
age and address, from drivers license records. When the banks would try to
collect and realized the person was deceased, they wrote off the loss. So,
the next time you’re met with the objection that new payment
technologies increase fraud and identity theft, share this story and
explain that risks have always existed and always will. It’s how we deal
with them that makes the difference. © Copyright
1995-2000 |
