Were Brute Force Attacks Key In Tesco Breach?
Gone in 6 seconds. Is it possible that hackers can correctly guess a card number, expiration date, postal code and CVV out of thin air and then use it to purchase goods fraudulently online? Apparently, it is. And this impressive video shows the hacking program created to do just that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwvjZGKwKvY Students at Newcastle University believe they […]
Is Fraud on Square A Problem? Not Yet, But It Could Be.
Take any card number. Type it into your computer. Get funds the next day! Wow. Well, I just received an interesting email from Square, that advised me I could do just that. The subject of the email said, “Your Computer = Your Payment Terminal.” They promised me that I could type in any card number […]
Buy Online, Pick-Up In Store Is Pushing Fraud Way Up
Black Fraud Day (Friday) was a big success for online retailers this year. Consumers flocked to their computers to shop this year pushing sales to over $3 Billion. That’s a 15% increase over last year. But consumers aren’t the only ones flocking to big internet sites like Amazon, Macy’s, eBay and Best Buy to […]
Fraud Scientist Tackles Football Turnovers in the NFL
When Joel Bock isn’t busy building fraud detection models to detect identity thieves like the ones that steal $6 billion a year filing phony tax returns, he uses his skills for his other passion – football analytics. Joel is a fraud data scientist by day analyzing massive sets of fraud data, identifying predictive fraud variables, […]
Retailers Brace for Millions of Fraud Attacks
The Friday after Thanksgiving is a great day for shopping. It’s also an awful day for fraud. As shoppers flock to retailers to snap up huge discounts on Christmas gifts, they create the perfect cover for fraudsters looking to hide. Black Fraud Day Not Black Friday Black Friday is so bad that Fraud Managers across the world refer […]
10 Hot Spots for Auto Lending Fraud in the US
Auto Lending Fraud does not get a lot of attention here in the US. If you consider that the fraud rate is about 50 basis points and there are close to $1 trillion in loans, the losses mount up pretty quickly. After doing some research and analysis of loan portfolio’s we were able to determine […]
40,000 Compromised Accounts at Tesco in 24 Hours
Tesco experienced a significant online fraud breach over the weekend with over 40,000 fraud attempts of customer accounts through their Online Banking channel. Tesco admits that they stopped about 50% of the fraud attempts but 20,000 customer accounts appear to have been compromised with a fraud loss. Customers that had fraud noticed withdrawals from their […]
IRS Bolsters Refund Fraud Defenses, This Year
Fraud is a cat and mouse game. The mouse has one for many years, but it appears the cat may have turned the tables. By Cat I am referring to the IRS and by mouse I am referring to the fraudsters that have plagued them with fraudulent tax returns. IRS Tax Refund Fraud has been the […]
US Card Fraud Hits Staggering $8 Billion in Losses
We are # 1! The numbers are in and the US is still the leader in Card Fraud Globally. Global fraud losses due to credit, debit and prepaid fraud hit $21 billion dollars and close to 40% or $8 billion in losses occurred right here in the US. The statistics are tracked by The Nilson Report and they […]
Mortgage And Auto Fraud Share Similar Patterns of Lies
Lies, lies, lies. That is always the case with fraud. And PointPredictive, the company I work for, just released analysis that finds that mortgage and auto fraud lies follow very similar risk patterns. Scoring Applications with Fraud Models Detected High Levels of Early Pay Default (EPD) The study found that by scoring auto loan applications with models […]
Fraud Consortium Rescues Lenders from Fraud
ShotGunning Fraud is no joke. I wrote about the problem last week in this article – Don’t Get Hit With ShotGun Fraud, Arm Yourself. The problem of shotgunning crosses multiple industries from Home Equity Loans and Mobile Check Deposits and wreaks havoc on banks causing billions of dollars in losses annually. The fraudsters […]
The Internet is Jammed. CyberHackers Wreck the Web.
The internet is like LA traffic on a Friday afternoon. It’s a parking lot and nobody is going anywhere fast. Today at least. DDOS attacks which many believe are being launched using a robot army of 1.5 million surveillance cameras are hitting the DNS backbone of the internet causing websites everywhere to become unreachable. The DDOS attacks […]
Read Letter Employee Sent Warning Wells of Fraud
An employee sent this letter to the CEO of Wells Fargo.
What’s Up Down Under? 1 in 4 Mortgages are Fraud.
Liar Loans. Here in the US we know this term all too well. Loans where borrowers lied about their income and employment were a major factor that lead to the demise of our mortgage market in 2009. We cleaned up our act and knocked out liar loans substantially by requiring multiple forms of verification of […]
Retailers Alerting Consumers About Reused Passwords
50% of consumers use the same password on their Facebook accounts, that they do on their Linkedin accounts and other services such as Uber, Amazon and Netflix. This is a real bad idea. A horrible idea actually, which puts consumers at heightened risk of identity theft, banking fraud and online fraud. How bad of an […]
Counterfeit Losses Drop 47% As Retailers Bring Up EMV
Visa is reporting that card issuers that have deployed Chip Cards have seen an average of 50% reduction in their counterfeit losses from this same time last year. With over half a billion Chip cards in circulation and millions of merchants accepting those cards, the US is now ranked as the top country in the […]
Good News, You’re Not Responsible for Fraud
The prepaid card industry is on fire. Having grown from $1 billion in 2003 to $112 billion estimated today it is the hottest financial product around. But as a consumer, I was always afraid to buy or use prepaid cards. It was always like carrying cash in your wallet which I never like to do. […]
Fake Call Center in India Busted for Big IRS Tax Fraud
Tipster Colleen Edwards of PowerMark reported some good news to me today and that is that a major fraud ring out of India has been busted for a massive fraud against US consumers. The fake call centers out of India were auto dialing hundreds of thousands of phone numbers daily, leaving messages to US citizens from purported […]
How Cameras Helped Hackers Raise A Big Robot Army
It isn’t often that your hobby and your career collide but recently that is just what happened to me. Photography is my hobby. Fraud and Security management is my profession. So when I learned that cameras were used to launch one of the largest cyber attacks in history, I was intrigued. It All Started with […]
MotionCode’s Dynamic CVV2 Will Kill CNP Fraud
I wrote a few weeks back about the rapid rise of Online Fraud. In 2016 fraud reports are up 400% thanks to BotNet attacks and the rollout of EMV technology. There just seems to be no end to the increases in CNP across the world and despite lots of controls and fraud tools there are […]
5 Fraud Schemes That Will Hurt You With ACH
Same Day ACH; All the fraud experts are predicting a big uptick in fraud when it goes into full effect one year from now. But the impacts could be felt even sooner as NACHA is reporting that 95% of banks are going to process both ACH debits and credits starting now. The volume of transactions is […]