The ticker tape of data breaches in the last few months has been astounding. Many have called 2011 “The Year of The Hacker“ and that prognostication has rung true, without question. Halfway through the year, data breaches are an incessant news story.

And despite the constant stream of bad news, consumers continue divulging a tremendous amount of data to retailers, auction sites, dating sites, and gaming sites. While awareness of fraud and cybercrime is at an all time high, consumers seem to feel they don’t have much of a choice but to provide all their data.

People have grown to love the Internet and all the conveniences it offers, both commercially and socially. In my household, little people under five years old whack away at online iPhone games, never knowing what it’s like not to have the Internet.

Many seem to feel that their privacy is the price they must pay for all this connectedness and convenience, and are even willing to put their personal security at risk in exchange. (more…)

All my life, I’ve been waiting for someone to give me a million dollars in diamonds, which have been willed to me by my long-lost Somalian stepfather, who’s supposedly the third generation dictator under the humble Mr. George Kinneus the Third. Or something like that.

If you receive an offer resembling that one, run for the hills.

This is what happened to the 55-year-old grandmother in New Zealand, who was simply looking for love online. She was checking out her prospects on Match.com, the most popular dating site. The grandmother got a “wink,” which is like a “poke” on Facebook, from “kiwibloke25.” According to his profile, “kiwibloke25” was a 55-year-old man seeking a serious relationship with a woman between 49 and 68 years old. (more…)

The Internet Crime Complaint Center fielded 303,809 reports of cybercrime in 2010. Of those cybercrime reports, auction fraud was the third most common complaint.

Auction fraud refers to fraudulent transactions on online auctions. Either a product advertised for sale is misrepresented, or purchases are never delivered at all.

The IC3’s annual report explains, “Historically, auction fraud has been the leading complaint reported by victims, with a high of 71.2 percent of all referrals in 2004. However, in 2010, auction fraud represents slightly more than 10 percent of referrals. This demonstrates the growing diversification of crimes related to the Internet.” (more…)

FedEx isn’t responsible for this scam, but their brand unintentionally lends credibility to the scammers, who reference FedEx in their scammy emails, knowing that aligning with FedEx helps their scam proliferate. It’s an insidious ruse that hurts all involved.

FedEx can and should deny suspicious online transactions. Moneygram and Western Union could also make some effort to deter scammers. It’s hard to weed out the bad guys, but there are technologies that help.

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This is just weird, but what about social media isn’t weird? We “friend” people we’ve never met. We share our plans, location, and mother’s maiden name with the world.

In New Zealand, weird can be defined as a 28-year-old Auckland woman who created and used several fake online profiles depicting young, pretty women to befriend unsuspecting high school boys. (more…)

While the hot new iPad provides an exciting platform to surf the web, exchange emails and read books, users are also using the computer tablet to access their existing accounts on social networking sites, play virtual games, and make online purchases much like they would on their home computer.

This past week, iovation has seen a rapid adoption of the iPad being used at our customer sites. We’ve seen the number of iPad transactions grow by thousands every single day since the new device was made available. And these transactions aren’t just occurring within the same industry. In fact, we’re seeing iPad transactions on a multitude of verticals including travel sites, social networks, sportsbooks, dating sites, credit issuers, MMOs and online social games. And our job is to make sure that the transactions processed are from legitimate, good customers.

Topping the list of industries where we’ve seen the most online transactions this week is online communities at 45%, with the majority on social networking sites as opposed to dating sites. The second largest group was online retail, accounting for 28% of total iPad transactions. Most of those transactions occurred on travel sites. And lastly, international gambling sites such as sportsbooks came in third, at 23% of all iovation-protected iPad transactions.

So that’s where we’re helping customers, but what information do fraud teams share within our database in order to reduce fraud losses and ensure good customers have a positive experience on their site?

iovation tracks over 30 different types of bad behavior and this segmentation is important to our customers. How they treat evidence (specific types of fraud and abuse) changes across various industries. For example, an online retailer cares about mitigating chargebacks and catching criminal activity before product goes out the door, whereas an online community cares more about stopping spam, solicitations, predators and phishing attempts, in order to protect community members and maintain a safe and trusted environment.

Our customers can customize our fraud protection service to gain control over the specific transactions and activities that they correlate with high risk. This allows them to take more business with confidence and spend less time conducting costly manual reviews.

Believe it or not, within the first week of iPad sales, we have already uncovered fraudulent activity. Over half of all transactions denied from iPads were specifically related to credit card fraud. In other words, they were fraudsters attempting to monetize stolen identities on our customers’ websites.

As iPads connect to online businesses to create accounts, submit applications and make purchases, it is very important for organizations to know whether or not the device:

• has committed fraud or abuse on their site
• has committed fraud or abuse at another business
• has relationships with other devices or accounts that have been involved with fraud or abuse
• has not been seen before, but matches the profile of other high-risk or suspect devices

As iovation’s global shared database of over 275 million devices grows, so do the reputations of iPads used to request transactions. This is important information that companies can use to determine whether or not a transaction requested by an iPad, or any other Internet device, can be trusted and just the kind of information iovation provides to its valued customers.