Cybercrime

Good con artists make an art of preying on people's fears, hopes, dreams and good intentions, and there's probably no end to the list of con schemes being perpetrated via the Web. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and the Web's openness is proving to be a seduction too strong to resist fo...

Law enforcement authorities in two countries on Monday charged 38 people in the U.S. and Romania with taking part in two different phishing-related fraud schemes that authorities say were tied to organized crime worldwide. The United States Department of Justice and the Prosecutor General of Romania...

A federal court has awarded MySpace nearly $230 million in its suit against Sanford Wallace and his partner Walter Rines -- aka the "Spam King." The judgment -- especially given the size of the award -- represents a decided victory for e-commerce sites in their costly battle against spam. This is th...

eBay has changed the payment policy for its Australian site to require all transactions to be completed using its PayPal payment platform, a move that has outraged users Down Under and one that reportedly could lead to more changes around the world. eBay announced last month that it would make the c...

Data management rules and regulations have become a major concern for businesses, due in large part to increasing oversight that often requires organizations to invest in new technologies in order to address compliance issues. However, the promise of enterprise technologies as a solution to the dema...

Identity theft, a cyber-crime causing inestimable damage for scores of ordinary citizens, has prompted passage of the federal FACT Act Identity Theft Red Flags Rule, issued this year. Part of the FACT Act, the rule aims to combat the scourge of identity theft, which each year victimizes 8.3 million...

The amount of click fraud decreased slightly in the first quarter, thanks in part to actions taken by Google and Yahoo, according to the latest Click Fraud Index by Click Forensics. The overall industry average click fraud rate was 16.3 percent in the quarter, which was down slightly from the 16.6 p...

Since 2005, millions of citizens have been affected by reported and unreported data breaches at payment processors, banks and retailers -- but the nation was still stunned when news broke out about the TJX data breach. This has indeed been a larger problem than most recognize, with some 88 million c...

The financial losses tied to Internet crime reached record levels in 2007, the FBI said Thursday, citing data from its annual Internet Crime Report. The Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3 -- which the FBI operates along with the nonprofit National White Collar Crime Center -- fielded 206,884 co...

Working with online car sales leads since the early part of the dot-com era, the cofounders of the Detroit Trading Exchange saw firsthand the inefficiencies in the market and set out to address them. The result is a robust and active trading exchange where car dealers and others bid to buy more than...

Having your private information leaked is bad enough, but having it put on BitTorrent is really the final insult. It happened before with MySpace photos. By most accounts, the private images made available earlier this year via peer-to-peer networks consisted mostly of poorly snapped photos of peopl...

Fraud is big business. Well-funded, well-orchestrated, sophisticated fraud rings aggressively change tactics and invent new technologies to cash in on the unprotected assets awaiting plunder. Every organization that provides individual service to its customers, employees, members or community is fac...

Think combating fraud is not of paramount concern to online merchants? The topic was front and center at the Merchant Risk Council's annual conference held in early March. Online merchants gathered there were eager to get a deeper level of understanding of how better to combat fraud -- fraudulent c...

Depending on which set of criteria you reference, ID fraud either is on a significant decline or will be a lingering threat for several more years. The general trend points downward. Overall, 2007 saw a 12 percent drop in ID fraud incidences to $6 billion, according to Javelin Strategy & Researc...

Despite the overwhelming success of e-commerce, there are still consumers out there too terrified to click their cart through a virtual checkout. Are they just a silly-nilly group, nutty as a bunch of conspiracy theorists? Or are the rest of us just too naive to get it? Neither, it turns out. "There...