Identity Thieves Can Max Out Your Credit Cards in Less Than Two Minutes
Identity thieves can deplete your available credit in no time. Dateline recently tried an experiment and documented it on video to test just how quickly sophisticated identity thieves could operate. It teamed up with a major credit card company which issued a couple of genuine credit cards under fake names. Then Dateline, with an identity theft expert posing as a thief, posted the bogus credit cards in underground chat rooms on the Internet. A fraud investigator for the credit card company monitored how much time it took for a thief to use the fake cards and max out the cards' $1,000 credit limit.
For the first credit card, the initial "hit" took only 12 seconds. The thief first began to make fraudulent charges in small amounts--like an $11 contribution to the American Red Cross--apparently to see if the card really worked. Once the thief figured the card was genuine, charges began to pile up in increments of hundreds of dollars. In less than 13 minutes, the credit card was declined for reaching its $1,000 limit.
The second credit card was maxed out in less than two minutes. This time the thief charged more than $700 in dog food alone. Illustrating the prevalence of identity theft wordwide, while the bogus card was issued for a fake person in Washington, D.C., someone in Chile charged the dog food.
The results of Dateline's experiment are illuminating. Identity thieves are operating wordwide through the Internet, and they are lightning quick and brutally efficient.
