On Wed, 01 Nov 2006 15:09:59 EST, Mike Callahan said:
Perhaps a better start on impacting this would be for the credit card companies to pursue the people that abuse their cards/systems instead of just writing fraudulent purchases off as a loss and not pursuing them any further.
Let's take a hypothetical $300 fraudulent charge. If the card company spends more than $300 pursuing it, it's losing money on it and is better off just swallowing it. Now what does $300 get you? If you're lucky, that gets you 5 hours of a tech's time to chase logs, make phone calls, and get all the evidence together, and 1 hour of a lawyer's time to get the ball rolling if you pursue it as a civil matter. How much pursuit can you get done in 5 hours? The credit card companies are *acutely* aware of *exactly* how much it costs to swallow any given fraud, and how much it costs to chase a particular miscreant down. And barring some major economic/political/legal changes that alter the price/performance ratio, they're unlikely to change the way they do things. (Hint - $50B sounds like a lot, but what percent of the total Visa/MasterCard business per year is that, really? Not much compared against the $1,325B done by the top 4 card networks in 2004: http://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/banking/2005nov/Art2table1.html The whole article is here: http://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/banking/2005nov/article2.html and discusses in fair amount of detail what the credit card companies *really* worry about, and why....