Cybercrime

Private, personally identifying information is everywhere, from portable computers and digital devices, to the Internet and private networks. This data can be obtained so easily -- either through technology or more mundane means -- and its theft is so often glamorized on film, that it is starting to...

eBay's PayPal unit will acquire the software firm Fraud Sciences for $170 million. The move could help boost confidence in the online payment industry and in the parent company's online auctions. Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, and founded by former members of Israel's intelligence agency, Fraud Sciences...

Online retailers today are facing what may seem to some as contradictory business challenges: delivering a superior online customer shopping experience and securing transaction information to protect customers and comply with regulatory mandates such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standa...

The bizarre and controversial case of a Missouri teenager who killed herself after being bullied through MySpace, allegedly by the parent of a peer, has reportedly shifted to California, where the social networking site is based. A federal grand jury in Los Angeles has issued a subpoena to MySpace, ...

A Michigan grand jury has indicted the man widely know as the "Spam King" and 10 others in connection with an alleged stock fraud scheme that used bulk e-mails to pump up the prices of stocks. The biggest name among those indicted is that of 52-year-old Alan Ralsky, who earned the nickname of "Spam ...

It is becoming increasingly unsafe to buy or otherwise conduct business online, according to the ninth annual CyberSource survey on e-commerce fraud. Fraudsters will divert approximately $3.6 billion from U.S. e-commerce in 2007, a 20 percent increase over 2006, based on survey results. Merchants ar...

Two men have been successfully prosecuted for sending out millions of unsolicited e-mail messages promoting pornographic Web sites, and reaping millions of dollars as a result. Jeffrey A. Kilbride of Venice, Calif., was sentenced to six years, and James R. Schaffer of Paradise Valley, Ariz., was sen...

Yahoo, eBay and PayPal are teaming up to improve protections against phishing attacks, the companies announced Thursday. The companies have adopted a new e-mail authentication technology, developed by Yahoo and known as "DomainKeys Identified Mail," that uses cryptography to verify the domain of the...

E-mail greeting card scams popular during the summer months seem to have lost their luster for information highwaymen. "We've seen an awful lot of greeting card malware in the last couple of months, but scammers have moved on to new techniques, simply because there was so much of it about that it st...

A data theft revealed over the weekend of some 1.6 million records from Monster.com does not raise issues of identity theft, the employment Web site asserted. "[T]here have been reports of this as an issue of 'identify theft,'" Monster Vice President of Compliance and Fraud Prevention Patrick W. Man...

Buyers are naturally cautious when considering whether or not to make a purchase from unfamiliar merchants. Even if this anxiety is not justified, the effect on online retailers is often detrimental. Shopper anxiety creates a complicated challenge for online merchants, especially ones without nation...

When online advertisers use pay-per-click advertising, as much as 15 percent of the clicks they pay for could be fraudulent, according to the results of a new study announced Friday. Under a pay-per-click agreement, an online advertiser must pay for every time a potential customer clicks on its ad.

Internet auction fraud accounts for close to half of all the complaints made to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, according to a report released Friday. Of the 207,492 complaint submissions made to the Internet Crime Complaint Center in 2006, Internet auction fraud accounted for 45 percent,...

Google plans to provide Web advertisers with more data and tools to combat click fraud, a damaging practice that costs advertisers an estimated $16 billion a year. The new tools are part of an effort to crack down on click fraud and dull its impact on the otherwise highly profitable pay per click on...

Last year, the average click fraud rate of pay-per-click advertisements appearing on search engine content networks rose to 19.2 percent for the last quarter of 2006, the highest yet, according to Tom Cuthbert, CEO of Click Forensics. Click fraud occurs when online advertisers pay search engine comp...