Is Australia an example of the consequences of inadequate investment in fraud prevention? Maybe not.
October 5th, 2009 by Max Anhoury“More than one in five people (in Australia) have fallen victim to credit card fraudsters or computer hackers.” This statistic comes from an article on Australian news site AdelaideNow, which details the findings of a recent report on credit and identity theft in the country. Apparently credit card fraud is up 23 percent from last year, and the blame is being placed on “Australia’s lapse in deploying anti-fraud technology.”
But people shouldn’t be too quick to jump to the conclusion that an increase in fraud is necessarily the result of negligent or inadequate fraud measures. It is unclear from this article that credit card fraud in Australia is any worse than in the rest of the world. I would be interested to know how they define a “victim” of credit card theft.
If being a victim simply means that an individual’s number has been stolen, then the United States might be in even worse shape. The attack on Heartland Payment Systems—located in the United States—resulted in over 130 million credit card numbers being stolen. Given that the current U.S. population is projected to be just over 307 million, then assuming the majority of the card numbers stolen were from Americans, our baseline fraud rate would be around 1 in 3 people.
Regardless of whether Australia is in worse shape than we are, it is clear that our credit systems are under siege. The sophistication and coordination of attacks on our personal and corporate machines, with the intention to commit fraud, has never been higher. No matter what country you reside in, identify theft and credit fraud is a serious problem and poses the most significant threat to the ecommerce industry.
