Ever wanted to buy some credit card numbers? Actually, you may now have a chance. If you’re into video games, you might have heard that Sony’s PSN was hacked and personal data of 77 millions customers was stolen.
As for now, we knew that hackers got logins, passwords, addresses, birth dates and so on. It was unknown whether they also got credit card numbers, transaction history etc. But now it seems that 2.2 million credit card numbers (including their CVV2!) are for sale!
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Wishing you all the best and a Happy Easter, we just wouldn’t be ourselves not presenting something colorful here. So there’s a nice infographic below, but that’s not all… If you’d like to see at least a few photos of our last day (and see what was very yummy ;)) before Easter at work, visit our Facebook profile.
Have a wonderful weekend everyone!
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Card Security Code – usually called CVV (Visa) or CVC (MasterCard); it’s a three or four digit code located on a credit card, but not encoded on the magnetic stripe. If a client can provide such a code, it proves that he actually is in possession of the credit card and didn’t use, for example, a card number generator or a copy (skimmed) of the card.
The most common code is CVV2 (or CVC2) used in card-not-present transactions. For Visa, MasterCard, JCB, Diners Club and Discover credit and debit cards, this is a three digit code printed on the back of the card. American Express differs a bit – they have a four digit code printed above the credit card number.
Also the names of the code differ. Apart from CSC we have:
- CVV2 (Card Verification Value) for Visa,
- CVC2 (Card Verification Code) for MasterCard,
- CID (Card Identification Number) for American Express and Discover.
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Issuer is an institution from which the consumer gets his credit card. Usually it’s simply a bank (hence the popular term issuing bank), but it might also be e.g. a credit union. Such bank is associated with credit card brands, like Visa, MasterCard or American Express.
The issuing bank is actually the institution, which grants you the credit. So they are the ones, who check your credit history, debts. And later they decide what your credit limit is.
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A chargeback means returning funds to a customer. It’s forced by the issuing bank and causes merchants a lot of problems, wasting their time and money. So obviously nobody likes a chargeback. Most merchants will do a lot, to avoid them. Even if their policy doesn’t allow refunds, they’ll probably give one to a client just to make him cancel the chargeback request.
So how to avoid chargebacks?
I won’t delude you that there is one efficient method. Sorry, chargebacks are troublemakers for all merchants and it’s going to stay that way – at least for some time. But it doesn’t mean, that you can’t do anything to avoid them.
If you get a chargeback request, than you usually have some time to prove your innocence. This means convincing the bank, that the client’s request is unjustified.
But that’s fighting the symptoms. It’s just saving your hide, not avoiding the danger. Let’s focus on the causes.
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It surely isn’t new that statistics lie or at least they don’t tell all the truth. Since social media are (unfortunately) very often about numbers, take a look at how many users does Twitter really have.
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