BBC journalists show how easy it is to obtain stolen credit and debit card details on the internet

(24/04/2008)

The BBC has announced that UK credit and debit card fraud on the internet is much greater than previously estimated. An undercover investigation by BBC News revealed how easy it was to obtain stolen credit and debit card details on the internet.

Posing as computer hackers, two journalists infiltrated a website selling thousands of stolen card details which had been stolen online from small internet retailers.

Greg Day, Security Analyst for McAfee commented: "We hear a huge amount in the news about end-users who have been victims of cyber-crime. However the BBC’s investigation shows that small online companies are just as much at risk as they may have shipped goods that they will never receive any money for. One small online business owner said that he has shipped a huge amount of his stock to fraudulent addresses which he has to foot the bill for and this has now left him near-bankrupt."

"McAfee carried out research last year which found that nearly half of the SMEs don’t consider themselves targets of cyber-crime, but this clearly shows that cybercriminals can successfully profit from taking little and often. Nearly all of the SMEs in our study has a false sense of confidence in their level of online security. In effect, many SMEs have a legacy understanding of the risk online and don’t have the correct skills or solutions to handle the problem. We often focus on the number of different players in a supply chain – the reality here is that there are a number of different victims in any one incident too."

Related topics:  Crime and Fraud Prevention   Internet and Web security 

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