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A forum for fraudsters

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 28 Aug 08, 17:03 GMT

In the last few days, I've entered a whole new web world. It's a place where people speak of getting "dumps... sniffed from ATMs" or using "blinds to cash out" or getting data through "rj 45 taps." The language belongs to a criminal community - the people who make a living out of credit card fraud.

They gather to swap tips and appeal for information on a number of web forums, and the one we've been looking at features some quite astonishingly brazen messages. The one which really caught our attention was about an attempt to use thousands of stolen US credit card details in British supermarkets. You can read the whole of it here.

The discussion on the crooks' forum is a bit of a wake-up call for all those who think that the introduction of chip-and-pin in the UK has wiped out card fraud. It has certainly made it harder - but the fact that the United States has yet to adopt the system gives the crooks a big opportunity in a crime which the internet has helped turn into a globalised business. So, as in this case, British fraudsters can buy stolen credit card details from the US and use them here because retailers still have to allow the "swipe and sign" option for overseas cards without a chip. Equally, card details stolen from UK consumers can be sold overseas for use in countries without chip-and-pin.

The author of the message appealing for information on where to use his cards - and offering "a ps3, 10 bottle of vodka or jd for weekend" in return - also has another post on the forum, generously offering advice on how to steal credit card details from cash machines. His guide to an "ATM skimmer" features photographs and technical details of a machine which is apparently attached to an ATM and then sends data to a mobile phone. Let's hope the police and the banks are studying this website too, and working out how to foil the fraudsters.

But a policeman I contacted admitted that it's a huge struggle to keep track of what's happening on these fraud forums - and virtually impossible to act against sites that are usually based abroad.

The fraudster describes his "interests" in his profile on the forum as: "Get rich... or Die Trying :)". By the sound of it, getting rich is still far too easy.

I suppose all of this is more proof that the internet is a brilliant way of organising people around the world with common interests. How sad that, all too often, those interest are criminal.

Continue reading "A forum for fraudsters"

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The Scrabulous puzzle

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 28 Aug 08, 10:46 GMT

I promised the answers to the little Scrabble/Scrabulous puzzle I set earlier this week - and here it is. The six words were DELUDED, OBLOQUY, IDIOTIC, OPENING, UNHAPPY and CABBAGE, which I managed to fit on the board in the manner shown in the picture.

I reckon that adds up to a score of 162, plus 50 for getting all seven letters out first go, so 212. Someone called "dashing dave" was first to post the answers.

But most of you seemed more preoccupied with wading into an argument about ithe rights and wrongs of the affair. Some championed the right of the Agarwalla brothers - who created Scrabulous - to give Facebook users a better twist on Scrabble than its makers could provide. Others felt Mattel and Hasbro had a perfect right to battle to protect their intellectual property.

But in this war of words you seem to be voting with your feet, and that's bad news for the official Scrabble. The Agarwalla brothers have already launched a Facebook game called Wordscraper, which has a different board and circular tiles to get round the copyright problem. It has a quarter of a million users, as compared to the 71,000 now using the official worldwide version of Scrabble on Facebook - a figure which has actually fallen in the last few days.

And it looks as though more players, desperate for their fix, may be heading for the Scrabulous website and playing the game there. The result? Less traffic for Facebook - and the prospect of a new punch-up over intellectual property between the Agarwallas and Hasbro and Mattel. Now, who's got a seven-letter, high-scoring word for that?

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