Stolen Credit Cards Used for Charity Donations
Theives are using stolen credit cards for charitable donations…
According to Symantec, criminals are becoming generous - with other people’s money - by making charitable donations as a way to check whether their stolen credit card numbers are working. “Using a charitable organization as a way to verify a credit card number is a relatively new technique, and it’s probably being used by a minority of the more innovative guys,” Zulfikar Ramzan, senior principal researcher with Symantec, said.
Once the charitable contribution is accepted, it validates the legitimacy of the credit card number and the thief then sells the card. Credit card numbers are bought and sold in underground “carder” forums, which bring together the people who have stolen the credit card numbers with those who want to use them. Unverified cards fetch up to $6 while verified cards can bring up to $18, said Javier Santoyo, a manager at Symantec.
The thieves usually donate less than $10. American Red Cross spokeswoman Carrie Martin said, “This happens all the time. We have people at the Red Cross who deal with this type of activity. There are a lot of red flags we look for.” One way is by spotting multiple donations using the same email address and a variety of different credit cards. The Red Cross automatically cancels these types of transactions.
Last month, the Red Cross was forced to return nearly $7,000 that was donated in the course of 700 fraudulent transactions. That figure doesn’t include the transactions the charity blocked because they appeared fraudulent. The fraud only accounted for a tiny sliver of the Red Cross’s $6 billion in revenue collected last year, but the organization has to pay staff to stay on top of the fraud which still hurts the bottom line, Martin said.
