Payment processor fears credit card crooks

Several Web hosting companies that use the Authorize.Net service to accept credit cards online saw a sudden spike in transactions over the weekend. The transactions, most for $500 and $700, were billed to Visa, MasterCard and American Express cards that belong to people across the U.S., representatives for three Web hosts told CNET News.com.

The Web hosting companies discovered the unusual charges through e-mail alerts that Authorize.Net sends after each transaction. Close to 3,000 suspicious transactions were pushed through the merchant accounts of three companies with which CNET News.com spoke, and more likely happened at other Web hosts, these three companies said.

On Sunday morning, in about an hour-and-a-half time period, fraudsters ran close to 1,500 transactions through the Authorize.Net account of Defender Technologies Group, a Web host in Ashburn, Va., said Tom Kiblin, the company’s CEO. “It was just under $1 million that got put through on our account,” he said. Kiblin says he has reported the matter to the U.S. Secret Service.

This sounds like a really bad credit card fraud case, but looking at the situation positively, the business caught the huge amount of fraudulent charges before it became an even bigger problem. If these credit card numbers were obtained from a single source, there should be very little trouble finding where the data was lost at. Visa and MasterCard have systems dedicated to tracking down the source of a loss of information, by matching similarities in charges on different credit cards.

Full Article – http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6057305.html