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Archer Jeffrey Conan 063 Conan i prorok ciemnosci
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Amy Raby [Hearts and Thrones Archer's Sin (epub)
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Co do grosza 1 Jeffrey Archer
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Cleo Scornavacca [Miss Taken Identity (epub)
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.Credit CardsCredit cards, reportedly first used in Europe for inter-business transactions in the 1890s, soon spread to other Western nations and were made available by banks to some of their credit-worthy business customers in the 1930s (Bellis 2008).Credit cards are a way to extend automatic credit to customers.In a modern economy, sellers offer goods and services to strangers in exchange for a promise to pay, based on systems that link the buyer to a specific account or credit history.While credit cards do not contain all of an individual’s identity information, they do provide access to the owner’s credit account, which makes them a frequent target of thieves.Like other entrepreneurs, thieves follow the money.Identity thieves acquire data about another person that enables them to counterfeit the person’s identification, so they can access goods and services by fraudulently charging someone else’s account.With the increasingly widespread use, by the 1900s, of credit, banking and utility accounts, various types of account fraud followed.Initially, credit cards could only be obtained by applying in person with photographic identification or by being vouched for by a bank manager.This made identity theft infrequent, but obtaining credit was cumbersome (IDTF History 2008).Credit cards did not become a common source of personal financial information until the early 1980s in the United States, when the Fair Isaacs Organization developed the FICO system of credit scoring (FICO 2009).This system of rating a person’s reliability was often supplied in the form of a report that contained other sensitive and private personal and financial information.If an identity thief could gain access to such a credit report, it was a simple matter to access bank and credit card accounts.During recent decades, credit cards have become easier to obtain.They are often, in fact, mass-mailed to consumers, with college students being a prime target.This has helped fraudsters to avail themselves of credit transactions on the Internet, as well as reap the bounty of automatic teller machines (ATMs).Ironically, a credit card is considered a superior form of identification, for both the legitimate owner and the thief.Hence, if another person has one in his or her possession and can display it to pretend he or she is someone else, then that someone else’s identity has been successfully stolen.And the speed with which thieves can reap the benefits of these thefts is legendary: some of us know people whose cards were used to buy diamonds in Brazil, cameras in Monte Carlo or groceries in Los Angeles—all before they knew their cards were missing—even though credit card companies continue to strengthen automatic safeguards to detect and prevent such abuses.It is a simple matter for a thief with a stolen credit card number to open new accounts and go shopping.The thief runs up charges on the stolen cards and returns the goods for cash.The advent of ATMs and the Internet were the identity thief’s dream come true, and identity theft continues to mutate by taking advantage of new technologies.Much of the recent increase in identity fraud has been made possible by modern online payment systems (Anderson & Rachamadugu 2008).The net effect is a negative impact on public trust (Acoca 2008), which dampens enthusiasm for online commerce.Consumer Identity DigitizationPrior to the existence of Internet support for business and personal transactions, personal identities in the paper world were tied primarily to a single identifier (in the US, the Social Security Number, or SSN, nominally a unique identifier, and in Canada, the Social Insurance Number, or SIN), or sometimes to driver’s license numbers.Businesses, governments and other entities in the United States commonly use the SSN for record locators for both identification and authentication.Use of the SIN in Canada as a common identifier is not illegal, but certain federal government agencies (Revenue Canada, Canada Pension Plan, etc.) are specifically authorized to use it (Privacy Commissioner of Canada 2011).Financial institutions and other businesses must also collect SINs because they are required to report certain personal information such as salaries and benefits to the relevant government agencies.In general, SIN use in Canada is not as widespread as SSN in the United States, where many externally provided identifiers like credit card numbers, student ID numbers and employee ID numbers are tied to SSNs.Paper records containing these identifiers could be accessed and stolen, but only by someone physically present where the records were stored.Thus, large-scale theft of these unwieldy paper records was relatively unlikely until widespread access to and use of the Internet became common.The smash-and-grab burglary of the past resulted in the theft of physical property like cash, jewellery and pieces of personal and financial information like driver’s licenses, social insurance cards, credit cards and chequebooks.The burglar became an identity fraudster by using the stolen identification documents to commit fraud on existing accounts or by opening new accounts.Classically, this was committed on a relatively small scale, since only one dwelling could be burglarized at one time, and there was, of course, considerable risk of being caught.Later, theft of other physical identification became possible, like carbon-copy imprints from credit card receipts, PINs (personal identification numbers) obtained by looking over a cardholder’s shoulder at the point of sale and digging through discarded office files.All these crimes must be committed in person, which obviously limited the volume of identity theft and fraud.Then a dream came true for the underworld: digitization.The digitization of paper records and their storage on networked computers, together with ineffective security, greatly increased the likelihood of illegal access and theft of massive files of names, addresses, social security or social insurance numbers, debit card account numbers and PINs, bank account numbers and passwords, mothers’ unmarried names, etc.(Schreft 2007).The risks to individuals whose identity information and other related data are held by third parties, including government institutions and businesses, include both privacy risks and the danger that stolen identity information will lead to fraud.The public is constantly advised not to give out personal financial information, to shred personal papers, and to be generally cautious when doing business online.Compliant as the public may be, these precautions do not protect citizens in the face of database breaches.Criminal tactics have changed, since thieves no longer need to steal single identities but can steal them by the tens of thousands (Schneier 2005) from databases that are managed, and ostensibly protected, by third parties like banks, credit card companies, retail firms and government agencies.This information is often available on Internet sites protected only by passwords, and personal credit histories are stored, controlled and often sold by companies that the identity owners don’t even know exist [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]