COLONIE — Bob Sobeck didn't need to call on his training as a former sheriff's deputy to know there was fraud afoot when he opened his small nonprofit group's credit card statement in November."I looked at the bill and saw a charge to China," said Sobeck, the executive director of the Alfred Housing Committee in Allegheny County. "And the farthest east I'd been was Albany."Specifically, The Desmond Hotel and Conference Center on Albany Shaker Road.Sobeck, who had been in town a month earlier for...
Fraud News
By ROBIN SIDEL And ANDREW R. JOHNSONGlobal Payments Inc., GPN -9.06% which processes credit cards and debit cards for banks and merchants, has been hit by a security breach that has put some 50,000 cardholders at risk, according to people with knowledge of the situation.The full extent of the breach couldn't be determined, one of the people said. It wasn't immediately clear if cardholders have been hit by fraudulent transactions.Representatives of Global Payments, based in Atlanta, couldn't be...
As far as criminal genius goes, physically stealing a credit card ranks somewhere between attempting to rob an armored car and stealing ice cream from kids in the park. It’s extraordinarily risky, but the payoff is usually about as rewarding as brain freeze.Often, a stolen credit card will be canceled before a thief even has a chance to use it. Other times, it’ll record every single purchase a thief makes and leave a nice little trail for the cops. Either way, when you steal a credit card, you...
National Consumer Protection Week 2012David Vladeck, DirectorWelcome to the fourteenth annual National Consumer Protection Week, March 4-10, 2012 and NCPW.gov, the site visited by hundreds of thousands of people in 2011.NCPW.gov, your “information destination,” hosts an incredible variety of resources on topics that matter to the nation’s consumers. The information offered by the ever-growing list of NCPW partners is both out of this world and within easy reach of people looking for practical...
A small celebrity-friendly restaurant in Utah is finally doing what many merchants have only dreamed of doing for a long time — taking on a part of the payment card industry’s powerful but flawed system for securing card data by fining merchants for failing to secure their data.Stephen and Theodora “Cissy” McComb, owners of Cisero’s Ristorante and Nightclub in Park City, Utah, have filed a lawsuit against U.S. Bank claiming that the financial institution, which used to process the restaurant’s c...
LIMERICK — Two New York men were arrested Tuesday and charged with fraud after allegedly using fake credit cards to buy items at area convenience stores.According to a release from Limerick Police Chief William Albany, police stopped Christopher Idore, of Queens Village, N.Y., and Rockiem Alke-Ryan Taylor, of St. Albans, N.Y., both 23, while driving a Toyota Corolla rented from Hertz that had been last seen leaving Limerick Sunoco where the two had aroused the suspicions of the cashier.The i...
Stay calm and carry on, people: It's way too soon to say that NFC should stand for Now Fatally Corrupted. Yes, Google's breakthrough NFC payments app Wallet is being mentioned all over the news thanks to a flaw--it's vulnerable to a hack that gives nefarious types access to your secure PIN number. But don't believe any doomsayers or fearmongering that you may encounter on this matter; it's not as evil as it seems and, believe it or not, it's actually a sign that the future of wireless mobile...
Class-Action Suit Argues Data Not SafeguardedZappos.com and its parent company, Amazon.com, face a class action lawsuit stemming from a recent data breach that affected more than 24 million customers (see: Zappos Breach Affects 24 Million).In the lawsuit, Stevens v. Amazon.com Inc., filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky, attorneys for Theresa D. Stevens claim that the defendants were entrusted with "safeguarding plaintiff's and class members' PCAI...