I came across a good podcast from RSA today that highlights the online fraud trends for 2009. It is only 10 minutes, but highlights several trends that I have spoken about in previous blogs. Specifically they highlighted three main trends in 2009 for online fraud:

1. There is an emerging trend toward “Fraud as a Service” FaaS.  This is a takeoff on Software as a Service (SaaS), but the speaker primarily highlighted the moving trend toward collaboration among the scammers.  There are trojan horse kits with promised patch releases once they are detected by anti-virus.  There are launch kits that allow online criminals to target organizations.  I also highlighted this movement toward an underground fraud value chain in previous blogs.
2. New account fraud is on the rise.  Whether it is enabled by identity theft or by synthetic identities, fraudsters are creating more new accounts than ever online.  This is actually one of the top frauds that we prevent for our customers.  Whether this is targeting credit issuers for online credit accounts, MMOs for new account creation for gold farming and spam, or scammers that target online dating sites and create repeat accounts, new account fraud is a real problem made worse by the fact that identity information is so easy to obtain.
3. Cross channel fraud.  This was highlighted as the trend to play off different channels such as web, phone and mobile environments against each other to enable fraud.

All in all, I found this to be a great podcast and worth a listen.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 8:39 am and is filed under Financial Services, Online Communities, Online Gambling, Online Gaming, Online Retail, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.