Victim Archives - John Sileo, Cyber Security Training

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Identity Theft’s Latest Victim? Your Business.

Latest Identity Theft Trend is Stealing Your Business’s Identity to Falsify Accounts

In the past two weeks, I have been contacted separately by two local business owners to share how their business identity has been stolen and used to set up accounts with various companies on which thousands of dollars are charged and they (the actual owners) are left to pay the bills. There are no identity theft statistics on this type of crime, but I am certain that it is just coming onto the trend radar. In further proof that this is becoming a major problem for corporations, the Denver Post ran an article this morning titled “Corporate ID Thieves Mining the Store“.

Here’s how this incredibly easy form of business identity theft works:

Identity Theft Scam Stole Millions – Pennies at a Time

The FTC just busted a long-running internet scam where offshore thieves set up virtual companies and stole millions of dollars from US consumers one small charge at a time.

“It was a very patient scam,” said Steve Wernikoff, a staff attorney with the FTC who is prosecuting the case. According to him, the scammers found loopholes in the credit card processing system that allowed them to set up fake U.S. companies that then ran more than a million phony credit card transactions through legitimate credit card processing companies.

The fraudsters were able to fly under the radar for so long because they only charged consumers between $ .25 and $9 and set up over 100 fake companies to pull off these transactions. In this specific case they charged over 1.35 million credit cards a total of $9.5 million dollars – those nickles and dimes really add up! Shockingly, 94% of these charges went undetected by the credit card holder because they didn’t notice an unusual charge on their credit card statements and fraud detection agencies rarely detect anything under $10.