[Asterisk-biz] CC Fraud

[Matthew Simpson]

>>It's actually fairly rare to get transactions that pass cvv that are
>>stolen cards, at least in most industries.  If you see high
>>percentages of that, I'm guessing it's a scam with the cardholders
>>consent, or a batch of physical cards that were stolen.  Both cases
>>are usually pretty rare.

We have had trouble with CC fraud as well.  To keep the chargebacks from 
piling up we have been using Paypal as a payment processor.  Paypal charges 
more percentage than a regular merchant account, but chargebacks are not 
subject to an extra charge unlike most merchant accounts which has saved our 
ass.  I've seen fraud transactions from 5 bucks to 500 bucks.  We only do 
calls to US + Canada so I just don't understand the motivation.  We used to 
get a ton of fraud to Western Union 800#s and the scammers were using us to 
"anonymize" themselves from Western Union.  We blocked WU's 800#s from the 
network completely which cut down on the fraud somewhat, but we still get 
fraud.  Our Fraud team used to try and make a pattern out of the calling but 
there doesn't seem to be one.  We did track one guy down to an IRC channel 
and basically credit card numbers with "full info" [meaning CVV, 
name/address/etc were all included] were being traded in the open channel. 
Also traded were paypal accounts.  Most of the guys were in russia -- we 
verified this both by IP address as well as by calling some of the numbers 
that were called -- person who answered the phone answered in russian most 
of the time.

I can't imagine how badly the guys that offer international are getting hit. 
You have to be pretty pathetic to steal phone service from us that costs a 
half a freaking cent.

We still have some old data from the scammers and our fraud team would be 
interested in a group effort in going after these little bastards.  Contact 
me at matthew at txlink.net and we can maybe put together a forum to share 
information about IP addresses / numbers called / etc.  We were able to 
trace one kid back to Phoenix Arizona -- he was smart enough to use proxies 
on our site but one of our programmers whipped up some special code that 
"unmasked" him and got his real IP address.  Maybe if we put together enough 
companies and enough information the Feds will start to care.

yours,
Matthew Simpson
www.txlink.net/
SIP and IAX termination at 0.005/min