A pre­vi­ous ar­ti­cle looked at some phys­i­cal ways that iden­ti­ty theft oc­curs in the Caribbean. Here, we ex­am­ine iden­ti­ty theft as it re­lates to cred­it card use, and in par­tic­u­lar, us­ing cred­it cards for pay­ments on the In­ter­net; some­times called cred­it card fraud.

Some in­di­vid­u­als do not want to have or use cred­it cards; their main con­cern be­ing cred­it card fraud. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, for them, it is now al­most im­pos­si­ble to trav­el with­out hav­ing a cred­it card as many ho­tels will not ac­cept a room reser­va­tion with­out it.

The ma­jor­i­ty of Caribbean peo­ple have be­gun to re­alise the wide choice and prices avail­able as a re­sult of In­ter­net shop­ping. There has been a mush­room­ing of this type of shop­ping which in­vari­ably re­quires the in­di­vid­ual to make cred­it card pay­ments. With this growth, it is im­per­a­tive that in­di­vid­u­als be­come aware of ways to pro­tect them­selves.

One as­pect of iden­ti­ty theft that should be recog­nised is that thieves do not need to get the ac­tu­al cred­it card but on­ly need the num­ber and de­tails about the card own­er.

A tech­nique be­ing used is that when the thieves get hold of a stolen cred­it card num­ber, they of­ten start with small pay­ments eg, pur­chas­es of burg­ers and fried chick­en, to see if there is any re­ac­tion af­ter sub­mit­ting the card num­ber. If there is no re­ac­tion, they grad­u­ate to mak­ing larg­er pur­chas­es.

It is there­fore im­por­tant to re­act quick­ly if your bank or a mer­chant calls you about cred­it card charges that you did not make. Of­ten, the best ac­tion is to im­me­di­ate­ly can­cel the card once there is the sus­pi­cion that it was com­pro­mised. Al­so im­por­tant is that card­hold­ers in­form the card is­suer when­ev­er they change their cell­phone num­bers. No one would want their bank to be call­ing them about sus­pi­cious trans­ac­tions and the bank can­not get through be­cause the cell­phone num­ber has changed.

It is ad­vis­able to have mul­ti­ple cred­it cards but on­ly use one card for all on­line pur­chas­es.

That cred­it card should have a low cred­it lim­it so that if the card is com­pro­mised the thieves can­not run up a huge bill.

In­di­vid­u­als should check their email reg­u­lar­ly, prefer­ably dai­ly. Most mer­chants, af­ter they have sold an item on the In­ter­net, send a con­fir­ma­tion email about the or­der. If you re­ceive an email about a pur­chase that you have not made, this may in­di­cate that your cred­it card was com­pro­mised.

In­di­vid­u­als should re­view their month­ly cred­it card state­ments prompt­ly to en­sure that they are aware of all the charges ap­pear­ing on the state­ment and im­me­di­ate­ly query any that they are un­aware of. They should al­so en­sure that they get a month­ly state­ment and if it does not ar­rive by the nor­mal date they should call their bank to find out why and get a copy of it.

It is crit­i­cal that shop­pers watch where they shop and look for se­cure pay­ment sys­tems. To de­ter­mine if the on­line store has a se­cure pay­ment sys­tem, look for dig­i­tal cer­tifi­cates such as the VeriSign or Mas­ter­Card Se­cure­Code or Ver­i­fied by Visa lo­go.

Al­so, check that the dis­played lo­go is gen­uine be­cause thieves some­times cre­ate false sites and place copies of these lo­gos on their false Web sites. If you are in doubt about the site, click on the se­cure pay­ment lo­go and see if it takes you to the cor­rect Web site.

In­di­vid­u­als should al­ways use the lat­est In­ter­net brows­er as this has built-in en­cryp­tion ca­pa­bil­i­ties that scram­bles the in­for­ma­tion you send to a serv­er.

This en­sures that the da­ta is pro­tect­ed us­ing the lat­est en­cryp­tion tech­nol­o­gy. Browsers from ma­jor soft­ware com­pa­nies such as In­ter­net Ex­plor­er and Fire­Fox use Se­cure Sock­ets Lay­er (SSL), which is an In­ter­net se­cu­ri­ty pro­to­col, to trans­mit and de­code sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion.

When us­ing your cred­it card, en­sure that you are on SSL. This can be eas­i­ly con­firmed by check­ing the URL to see that it changed from http to https. A small lock icon should al­so ap­pear on the sta­tus bar at the bot­tom of the brows­er win­dow.

Stolen cred­it cards is a huge busi­ness and op­er­ates world­wide. Stolen cred­it card in­for­ma­tion from some­one in the Caribbean can be eas­i­ly sold to some­one in East­ern Eu­rope or the Far East and the cred­it card in­for­ma­tion used there. As a re­sult of the in­ter­na­tion­al na­ture and the fast mon­ey that can be made by cred­it card thieves, all types of ac­tiv­i­ties are used to ob­tain cred­it card in­for­ma­tion.

One of these ac­tiv­i­ties is to plant mal­ware on the com­put­ers of un­sus­pect­ing in­di­vid­u­als. Mal­ware is used for fraud to cap­ture per­son­al in­for­ma­tion, birth date, bank ac­count in­fo, cred­it card num­bers, pass­words etc.

Every­one should there­fore have their com­put­er reg­u­lar­ly swept to de­tect any mal­ware im­plant­ed on their ma­chine.

In­stalling up to date qual­i­ty an­ti-virus soft­ware that in­cludes mal­ware pro­tec­tion and hav­ing that soft­ware do sched­uled au­to­mat­ic sweeps of your com­put­er is one mea­sure for pre­vent­ing or de­tect­ing mal­ware.

If the in­di­vid­ual does on­line bank­ing, they should look­out for scams that come in their email.

Im­posters send phish­ing emails that look like they are from your bank but seek­ing to get you to re­veal con­fi­den­tial in­for­ma­tion.

Your bank will nev­er re­quire you to re­veal your ac­count num­ber or cred­it card num­ber be­cause they al­ready know it. Every­one should there­fore be alert to these types of email.

It is said that in­for­ma­tion is pow­er and so every­one should reg­u­lar­ly keep them­selves up­dat­ed about the lat­est scams and cur­rent risks plus pro­tec­tion mea­sures.

There are many free re­sources on­line to en­able in­di­vid­u­als to keep up to date. One such re­source is the Scam­busters Iden­ti­ty Theft In­for­ma­tion Cen­ter, http://www.scam­busters.org/iden­ti­tytheft.html. An­oth­er source is the US Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion (FTC) where you can find in­for­ma­tion and sign up for email alerts.