Credit card or the plastic money has given us lot of convenience on the good side and hell lot of head ache on the bad side. Credit card fraud as it’s commonly called put the layman to lot of trouble. In the FBI’s 2007 Financial Report, $52.6 billion overall losses were reported in the United States alone. Let’s go one by one on various forms of fraudulent activities by credit card thieves.

Physical card theft
Some people believe that their credit card is safe if they don’t use the cards online. Wrong! Eighty percent of credit card theft occurs offline and sometimes even in front of our eyes. Credit cards have to be handed over to the merchant’s employees and many times these employees with the help of some techies swipe the card to duplicate swiping machines. The card information is then duplicated on other plastic cards freely available in market.

Sometimes the employees are not educated enough that they swipe the card two or three times which result in duplicate charges. Lost credit cards are also misused within hours resulting in huge transactions. Customer needs to pay the charges till the card is canceled which can be done easily by contacting the card issuing bank.

Online card theft
Credit card is used online without physically presenting the card and is authenticated by entering the correct user name, date of expiry and CCV number. Growing numbers of credit card fraud are reported online. The hackers usually trap the customer by sending email or sending them to fake websites which asks for credit card information. Most of the time they disguise themselves are from bank or some legitimate sources where the customer has previously carried out some transaction.

Credit card information is also stolen when the website where the customer entered the credit card number is hacked and the information is leaked. Many websites store the credit card information without any encryption and the information is easily accessed by prying eyes. These types of activities can easily be stopped with little caution from the customer end. Depending on trusted payment providers like PayPal, Google checkout etc will help to some extend as they never expose the credit card information to the online merchant. Looking for SSL (https) on pages where we enter the card number will also help to protect the card information online.

Here are some common scenarios of credit card theft

• Wallet theft
• Disguise as employee from bank or some other well known organization
• From old discarded credit card statements
• Colleagues/ Friends accessing your computer
• Fraudulent emails, phone calls etc
• Hacked personal emails
• Shared/ compromised computers

What do I do if my card is stolen?

• The first and the most important step that you have to do is to contact the credit card issuing bank.
• Raise the complaint with the bank and wait for their response
• File complaint at the local police station or the cyber crime wing