{"id":185305,"date":"2017-07-16T12:00:42","date_gmt":"2017-07-16T10:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=185305"},"modified":"2017-07-14T17:03:52","modified_gmt":"2017-07-14T15:03:52","slug":"credit-card-fraud-what-you-need-to-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/finance\/185305\/credit-card-fraud-what-you-need-to-know\/","title":{"rendered":"Credit card fraud: what you need to know"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you are the owner of a credit or a debit card, there is a non-negligible chance that you may be subject to fraud, like\u00a0millions of other people around the world<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Starting in the 1980s, there has been an impressive increase in the use of credit, debit and pre-paid cards internationally. According to an October 2016\u00a0Nilson Report<\/a>, in 2015 more than US$31 trillion were generated worldwide by these payment systems, up 7.3% from 2014.<\/p>\n

In 2015, seven in eight purchases in Europe were\u00a0made electronically<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Thanks to new online money-transfer systems, such as Paypal, and the spread of e-commerce around the world \u2013 including, increasingly, in the developing world – which was\u00a0slow to adopt online payments<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 these trends are expected to continue.<\/p>\n

Thanks to leading companies such as Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon India (which together had\u00a080% of the Indian e-commerce market share in 2015<\/a>) as well as Alibaba and JingDong (which had upwards of\u00a070% of the Chinese market in 2016<\/a>), electronic payments are reaching massive new consumer populations.<\/p>\n

This is a goldmine for cybercriminals. According to the Nilson Report, worldwide losses from card fraud rose to US$21 billion in 2015, up from about US$8 billion in 2010. By 2020, that number is expected to reach US$31 billion.<\/p>\n

Such costs include, among other expenses, the refunds that banks and credit card companies make to defrauded clients (many banks in the West cap consumers\u2019 liability at US$50 as long as the crime is reported\u00a0within 30 days for credit cards and within two days for debit cards<\/a>. This incentivises banks to make significant\u00a0investments in anti-fraud technologies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Cybercrime costs vendors in other ways too. They are charged with providing customers with a high standard of security. If they are negligent in this duty, credit card companies may charge them the cost of reimbursing a fraud.<\/p>\n

The types of frauds<\/strong><\/h3>\n

There are many kinds of credit card fraud, and they change so frequently\u00a0as new technologies enable novel cybercrimes<\/a>\u00a0that it\u2019s nearly impossible to list them all.<\/p>\n

But there are two main categories:<\/p>\n