Sign in / up

back to article ID thieves bring ease of use to trafficking forums

As cyber crime goes mainstream, a working knowledge of English is no longer a required skill for identity thieves trafficking in stolen credit card numbers and other personal data. Just ask Matthew Miller, a pharmacist from Pennsylvania, who recently learned miscreants had translated some of his personal details into French …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections
This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Does this really surprise anybody?

    When I read this all I could do was shake my head, but at the same time almost admire their ingenuity and abject laziness by writing scripts to translate the data... Probably courtesy of Google.

    0 0
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Dead Vulture

    Are you sure they haven't always

    Or at least for some time now it seems fairly obvious. Now eBay again so you want to buy , half a cheese sandwich, pet food(pets dead sell it's food), carpet pieces (a little smelly but still good), or old postcards from vacation in the upper pa of Michigan ebays the place new try our direct ID theft hotline to France translation included. Try to learn no more fleabay or wheelie chair, >KZEERRRRT< got it.

    0 0
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I really don't get the point here...

    Scared that not only the 1.8bn English speaking ne'er do wells will buy your credit card info? Not to mention if (when) they translate it into Chinese!

    EAfH

    (...or is it just too early in the morning?)

    0 0
  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This is just a symptom...

    ... we should be concentrating on the real problem.

    ID theft can be made much harder - but we have to recognise the problem and then drive a solution. The easiest one to fix is credit & debit card fraud after ID theft via CNP transactions. We can stop it using a number of methods, such as the GrIDsure method - detailed & discussed here in our Register - which can generate OTP instead of PIN or Pa55words.

    We have the technology available, it's just the banks & APACs hiding the problem!

    0 0
  5. Ross

    What's the story?

    So is the story that someone can translate a few odd words into another language automatically (s/// being so advanced and all) or that this guy lost his details to scammers twice in a year?

    I mean come on, once *maybe*, but surely after realising what a pain it is he'd have kept his eyes open for such scams. Or was he buying penis pills on the internet and that's how they got his details? Anyone wanting to take bets?... :o)

    0 0
  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @ Anonymous Coward

    You forget that since the introduction of Chip and Pin, Liability, primarily, now lies with the retailers and you - The Banks managed to shift it from them with this introduction.

    0 0
  7. John A Blackley

    Next

    An interesting - if small - development in the world of id theft. Interesting in the sense that the theives are developing skills to market their wares.

    The development I'm looking for also falls into the 'business model' realm - and that is volume transactions. So far the 'market' for stolen identities is not constrained by the protection given to those identities by government and corporate custodians. (If the general public were truly aware of how vulnerable their personal data is, they'd never use online transactions again.) Nor is the market constrained by the low skills of the thieves (no further explanation necessary but see my previous point.)

    Thus far, the biggest constraint on the 'market' is the lack of a wholesaler's 'back end' - in other words, a channel that can move the many, many millions of vulnerable ids profitably. However, I don't think this will be long in coming.

    0 0
This topic is closed for new posts.