QHM Pompey

[bedouin]

Steeling Credit Card numbers is pretty well the simplest form of this sort of crime. You give your credit card details to lots of people all the time.

I can easily believe that a significant proportion of registrations on dubious or illegal sites are done using stolen credit card details - as much to retain the anonymity of the user as to avoid payment.

Reputable web sites will take a lot more care to ensure the correct identity of the user, since they bear the cost of fraud themselves.

However the point I was really making was that these information crimes don't have to cause you direct financial loss to cause a lot of pain.

If QHM is a victim then it could happen to any of us. Given the current paranoia [1] about child abuse such an allegation against any of us could easily cost us our jobs, cause our children to be taken into care or our marriages to break up....

[1] For the record let me say that anyone truely guilty of abusing children should be forced to eat their own gonads - but in my mind false accusations of child abuse have done almost as much harm.



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[l'escargot]

And the point that I was making was that there are far more extensive gains to be made from false credit card details than access to a subscription website (of any description). Whether it is believable or not, I am not aware of any evidence that suggests it is widespread. Illegal sites still use legal card processing organisations, with the same security controls - that is how the authorities access this information.

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[bedouin]

Such as?

Clearly if you are not in physical possession of the card, you can only make "cardholder not present" transactions. For that the risk lies with the retailer, so you are highly unlikely to find anyone prepared to provide you physical goods without having a verifiable destination address.

The point about on line subscription services is (a) that they have no feasible way of confirming the identity of the subscriber and (b) they don't need to worry too much about fraud since as there is not physical deliverable the unit cost is very low, so the actual loss is not significant

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[Iota]

I believe that 'stolen' credit cards are used for a variety of purposes including the purchase of 'illegal' goods and services, if you buying illegal goods and services it makes a lot of sense to pay a large sum of money for the one time use of a number and not use it anymore. Most credit card fraud goes unreported for a variety of reasons none of which makes much logical sense. I simply think that QHM like the other RN Commander should have the right to privacy until the investigations are complete. The RN would not have contacted the press so who did and why? I know a number of people who think in the case of QHM it might well have been a member of the constabulary or someone closely associated with them.

Iota

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[l'escargot]

I would be interested in what your assertion that "Most credit card fraud goes unreported..." is based on. Banks and credit card companies put huge amounts of resources into fighting fraud and individuals report individual cases of it. Would you not report an unauthorised or unknown transaction that appeared on a credit card statement? I would. And why should an "RN Commander" have any greater right to privacy in a criminal case than any other individual? Why would "a member of constabulary" contact the press?

I hope these allegations aren't true, but I think that people are coming up with some very unlikely reasons why they aren't that simply do not stand up and are probably counter-productive. This is not the first case of it's kind and the process of evidence gathering is well established; some very prominent people have been prosecuted and convicted.

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[bedouin]

I don't know about "unreported" but I know that the credit card companies are very secretive about the true level of fraud (at least they were a couple of years ago).

I'm a bit out of date now, but I don't think you'll find official figures published by the industry giving the level of fraud.

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[tome]

Sadly, he's now been charged, update here