Friday, 3 April 2009

Online fraud is flourishing

A report in the Wall Street Journal features remarks made by Katherine Hutchinson, senior director of global risk management at PayPal. She reportedly told the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco that the online fraud industry was so lucrative that an "underground community" existed where fraudsters offered their specialist skills to others.

She also warned that the use of IP addresses for determining a customer's location were no longer a suitable method of combating online fraud - IPs addresses can be easily masked for one thing, and fraudsters often use "zombie" computers. She also warned that all the confusion in the banking sector caused by the current economic crisis left the door open for phishing attacks by fraudsters asking customers for bank account details.

1 comment:

Fernando Alvirez said...

I'm a bit late with this comment but I guess nothing much has changed since then and it's not a very comforting idea to read such stories.