Crime Prevention Tips

Credit Card Protection

I have seen in recent headlines that "8 million credit cards hacked," meaning that a hacker infiltrated a credit card processing company's records, etc. The solution the paper gives you is pretty generic and not very effective.

Here are some real-world solutions to minimize damage from unauthorized credit card use, which is basically someone knowing the name, number and expiration date, and most often occur with online & phone transactions.

Isolate your accounts. Use a "throw-away" account for all of your online and phone transactions, and the one used at the video store (more on this). Open a free checking account at Washington Mutual, or any other bank offering free accounts, a bank that is DIFFERENT than your main account from which you pay your bills and mortgage, the one that you deposit your income in to. With this free account, obtain a debit card, which functions like a MasterCard or Visa. Put about $500 into this account. Use this account number for the online and phone transactions, making it public, though secured in most cases, still public. Manually feed $$ into this account yourself. That way, unauthorized used of this account is limited to the smaller $$ in the account and is isolated from your main account, and this free account can be easily shut down and a new one started without any major hassles.
Use the throw-away account for your video/DVD rental store account. No matter what electronic security measures are used, the weakest link is simply a person. Social engineering is an art that is alive and kicking. Obtaining someone's credit card info is actually very easy. It goes something like this.

Find out where a person rents his/her videos/DVD's, let's say Blockbuster.

Phone call #1: Call the Blockbuster and say how appreciative you are of recent special help and you would like to send a thank you letter to the manager. Ask what is the manager's name, and what is the store number since you may also want to send the letter to corporate HQ.
Phone call #2: Call a different Blockbuster in a neighboring city. Say this is manager so and so with store # so and so, and that I have a customer who says he's got an account with you guys, and he wants to rent a couple of DVD's, but our computer's been having problems and they're down right now, so I'll just write it down for now and enter it later. The customer's name is so and so, what's his account number, his credit card number, expiration date, any outstanding balances owed? Thanks for the help.

This is just a basic scenario and involves just a little more than this, but this is just to exemplify the point about social engineering.

Manny Tau, Psy.D.
www.mannytau.com
Used with the permission of the author.

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Credit Card Protection