This made Cuppe one of the more than 50 million victims of identity theft so far this year, but in Cuppe's case the trouble was just starting.
The anonymous thief used the credit card details to establish a bogus website that appeared to belong to Mastercard. He then sent out millions of e-mails pointing recipients to the counterfeit website and urging them to type in their account details.
By now the information is probably floating round cyberspace, up for sale on sites like IAACA.com, (the International Association for Criminal Advancement). That is an online marketplace for "dumps" of stolen information, a sort of eBay for data criminals, where people can buy thousands of stolen identities and swap advice about the best time to break in to an account and how to transfer the money so that it's untraceable.
Better late than never, the U.S. media is starting to send out warnings about the implications of this growing threat, which could not only endanger the basis of online transactions - but also seriously corrupt the electronic foundation of the modern economy where billions of dollars zip between accounts on a daily basis. That's not to mention the Kafkaesque nightmare of bureaucracy and fraud that millions of victims will experience.
Barely a week goes by without reports in the U.S. media of a new identity theft scam on the Internet, or even worse a security breach at companies and organizations that process credit card and electronic payments or hold personal data. With the U.S.'s lax privacy laws these reams of information are sent from company to company and kept on file long after they are needed.
The danger of this policy was starkly highlighted last week when Mastercard revealed that as many as 40 million accounts may have been compromised by a breach at a processing firm called CardServices. The spectacular glitch even prompted the usually restrained Washington Post to proclaim: "Call 2005 the year of the data breach".
The New York Times reported Friday that cardholders in Australia, Japan, China and elsewhere in Asia have been told that their accounts would be at risk if they performed transactions in the U.S. or with a U.S. company.
The paper also suggested that banks often used unregulated contractors like CardServices and looked the other way when they failed to impose stringent security measures.
With news like that it's not surprising that consumers are starting to worry. According to a study by Gartner Inc., an IT research company, three out of four Web shoppers say they are more cautious about where they buy goods online, while one in three reported buying fewer items than they would otherwise because of security concerns.
"Companies need to take steps quickly to beef up online security," Avivah Litan, research director at Gartner, said in a statement. "We are seeing unprecedented levels in consumer transactions online. Yet businesses cannot rely on the Internet to lower costs and improve marketing efforts indefinitely, if consumer trust continues to decline." <!--page-->
In a separate study released Thursday by the Conference Board, more than 13 per cent of Internet users said they or a member of their household has already been a victim of identity theft. More than half of online consumers surveyed said their level of concern has grown over the past year, and many are buying fewer goods online. Nearly 70 per cent of users have installed additional security software, while 54 per cent discard special offers.
American experts agree that the identity theft problem in the United States is far more serious than in other countries because of the U.S. economy's reliance on credit cards. U.S. merchants have also been loath to require too many safeguards because they want to make the transaction as easy as possible. It's much easier to spend with a few mouse clicks than if you have to fill in several passwords and remember a PIN (personal identification number), not to mention the biometric identifiers or revolving passwords that are needed for adequate security.
Security experts warn that society is only at the start of a process that can only end badly - and is already spreading across the world.
"The story that needs to be told is the larger, long-term threat to the American financial industry," said Jim Melnick, the director of threat development at iDefense, which gathers intelligence on cybercrime. "It's a cancer. It's not going to kill you now, but slowly, over time."
"We're not making an impact," said Jody Westby, the managing director of security and privacy practise at PricewaterhouseCoopers. "The criminals are too hard to track and trace, too hard to prosecute, and the information they steal is too easy to use."
Tim Mullen, a cyber security expert at Anchor, a security software company, says the system has to be rebuilt from the ground up to enhance data security. "It will cost time and money, but there is no alternative."
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