If you’re curious to know what’s topping people’s wish lists this holiday season, just take a look at online sales. No big surprise, electronics are where it’s at. Based on information provided by fraud prevention experts (and iovation partner) Retail Decisions (ReD), the top-ten list of products sold online during Black Friday was dominated by GPS systems, televisions, digital cameras and video game consoles.

Besides providing statistics on what online purchases people were spending their hard-earned money on during Black Friday, ReD also noted that online criminals were out in force, busy spending other people’s money. “Whilst online retailers witnessed a huge upturn in sales this Black Friday, fraudsters are also ’spending’ more, with an average value of $248 per transaction online, 23% more than the average genuine customer,” said ReD’s CEO, Carl Clump.

And in most cases, it seems that fraudsters were clamoring for the same hot commodities as everyone else. Based on ReD’s list, the three most popular items bought with stolen credit cards were gift cards, Nintendo Wiis and Xbox 360s. Of course, this doesn’t mean that fraudsters will soon be kicking back and playing their stolen video games. It’s important to remember that for criminals, online theft is a business, and the principles of supply and demand are still in effect. Fraudsters choose to steal items that are in high demand because it will be easy to turn those goods around for a quick profit.

The problem is, if online criminals are profiting—it means online merchants aren’t. And while a new camera or video game might be at the top of many of our wish lists this season, for online criminals, it always comes down to one thing: money.

Tags: black friday, Carl Clump, fraudsters, gaming fraud, identity theft, Online Fraud, online theft, Retail Decisions, scammer, video game consoles

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Holiday Fraud, Online Retail. 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.