I come from a country where most people don’t have a credit card.
I cannot wrap my head around [this](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vmh3_nSR1jU) documentary.
Now I get that credit card fraud *is* a big problem.
But if all you need is the card number to order stuff, and card numbers are so easy to come by as shown in the documentary, then why is not every single criminal in the US running a credit card fraud operation?
It seems super easy and low risk. Get a burner device, order stuff from public wifi, and don’t be stupid about the delivery locations.
In: 548
I used to program anti fraud systems for a CC company actually. There are two main places to fight fraud, at signup (fake accounts or ID theft) or at purchase (stolen card)
In the moments after you swipe your card where the terminal says “authorizing…” or you click “purchase” on a website, a very fast computer system is doing hundreds of checks to make sure everything about the transaction lines up. For example, if your history show you never leave town and make relatively low cost purchases, a very expensive purchase from the other side of the country will be denied and the bank will notify you. These systems are getting more and more sophisticated every year and great pains are taken not to trigger false positives because if your card gets declined too often for legit purposes then you’re less likely to use it. This is one application where “machine learning and AI” aren’t just buzzwords but have a huge practical use case and millions are spent on these systems.
For fake accounts, that is a big problem that costs a lot of money. I know less of the details here but companies buy and sell a lot of data about people and when you sign up for a card the company cross checks things you told them about your identity with information they already know about you from other sources.
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