7 ms·

> because the sum stolen – £40,000 – is deemed not large enough to bother the authorities There was an investigative news story on TV about a couple who would

> because the sum stolen – £40,000 – is deemed not large enough to bother the authorities There was an investigative news story on TV about a couple who would order hundreds of thousands of dollars of merchandise over the Internet using stolen credit card numbers and brazenly have it delivered to their own home. The TV crew showed their house brimming top to bottom with boxes and boxes of fraudulently obtained goods that they would resell on eBay. They said no police ever visited them. In every one of the frauds the couple committed, the merchant would know that he shipped to (for example) 1234 Main St, Minneapolis. The credit card issuer, bank, and defrauded card holder would have the address also. Probably hundreds of police reports were made, or am I assuming too much? If a single policeman actually followed up on one of these "too small" thefts of $100 to $1000 they could have prevented hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional theft. I imagine that the system breaks down because no one reports the fraud or pushes to get something done, or because the police don't follow up, or both.

Waterluvian 8y ago
It's kind of bizarre. I'm no expert but I feel like tackling petty theft is a form of preventative medicine for crime. Getting away with crime might embolden people and reinforce their assumption that you can get away with it. When I was younger some teens would water balloon my family's house a few times a week. We called the police when we thought we figured out who it was. They showed up within an hour, had a chat about it then went to the kids' houses who promptly confessed. It was all handled outside the legal system. Later I told a police officer about this story and asked why they were able to give it so much attention so promptly. He said something along the lines of, "it's easier to deter them now while they're still afraid of their parents' wrath."
- dhimes 8y ago
  I wonder if it's just economically more advantageous for the credit card companies to absorb the debt and simply nudge interest rates up a bit to recover their losses.
  - pakitan 8y ago
    That's exactly what they are doing except the part with "absorbing debt". Banks and credit card companies don't suffer any losses because it's the merchants who absorb them. And that's the root of the problem. Majority of CC fraud is easy to eradicate but banks just have no incentive to do it.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      Sounds a little like the economics of employer based health insurance. The parties with negotiating power (companies and health insurance) don't have much incentive to get a good deal for the patient because the patient is captive. Same for merchants and credit card companies.
      - namibj 8y ago
        It could/should tho be changed so that health insurance up to x% of income is tax-deductible, but only if freely chosen on a free market by the employee, with any other constellations being taxed as regular income, without the tax-deductibility. There can still be plans only offered to employees of a specific company, but the issue of preventing an employee from shopping insurance himself is gone.
    - namibj 8y ago
      There are alternatives e.g. girocard/giropay in Germany where the bank of the buyer takes the risk (only if a PIN was used, iirc.). The former is POS, the latter online. Accepting the latter does still cost 3%, and like 20ct or so per transaction. The risk is just not there for the merchant, so this might make sense. Therefore it is in the interest of the buyer's bank to make him adopt tighter security, e.g. with 2FA, in the form of sms or a rubber keyboard/lcd/photodiode based device that enables HID and limited automatic reading of a 5-bar blinking code on the screen to the chip in the bank card, which provides an 8-digit code bound to this specific transaction that has to be entered below the blinking bars. The main benefit there is that banks are iirc. legislated to provide this to everyone, and because merchants have no risk this way they don't ever have to filter potential customers based on perceived creditworthiness and similar factors.
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  There's a lot of conflicting evidence/opinion on this idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#Criticis...
pjc50 8y ago
It's instructive to compare this to the amount of effort involved in prosecuting completely trivial amounts of drugs. Petty theft, especially of bicycles, gets almost no investigation either.
cubano 8y ago
This is surprising to me for when I was in Florida prison in 2003 there was a man who was serving a 15-year "3 strikes" sentence for stealing a rusty $30 bike off a house porch. I was incredulous, as of course was he, and I asked to look at his paperwork because, frankly, I didn't believe him. Often, I have learned, when you hear of things like this in the system, once you look at the paperwork you find out "oh, on top of stealing the bicycle you also pulled a gun on someone" or something of the like that explains things. Not this time...the guy was a drug addict in his 40's who had a lifetime of petty crap, and I guess the judge was in a shit mood the day of sentencing. Since a porch is attached to a house..an "occupied dwelling" in Florida parlance, this was considered a rather serious crime, thus the 15-year bam! I guess I'm trying to say...it depends upon several factors how things like this are going to be treated. To be honest, I have a few "friends" in Vegas now that are telling me they are really cracking down on fraud and handing out real time behind relatively minor offenses. Just carrying a fake ID in Vegas with priors will get you a 2-5 year state-sponsored vacation.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  I'd much rather live in a society where I have to guard my credit card info an lock my doors than one in which the state will cart people off for nonviolent crimes like stealing a bike or using a fake ID. Petty criminals are much less of a drag on society than the measures society would need to take to get rid of them.
  - imgabe 8y ago
    See if you feel that way when it's your bike that gets stolen. Especially if it's your primary mode of transportation. Petty crimes like this ruin otherwise helpful ideas. In my city I've come across a number of Bird scooters that have been vandalized, had the GPS ripped off to presumably steal them for personal use. If nobody does anything about that, an otherwise great idea that could seriously help people get around more easily and reduce traffic and pollution will simply not work, because we allow some people to get away with being assholes.
    - 8y ago
csomar 8y ago
Is this in the US. I'm tempted to call BS on the story. I live in a country with bad policing and these type of crimes are taken seriously. Like if you use the card for 50-100$ purchases, your next will probably jail time. Another point: Did the card owner complain? Usually, when a complaint happen multiple parties are involved. The shipper gets a charge back on his account, so he'll actually care to pursue. MasterCard/Visa also pursue these issues as well as the banks involved in these transactions. tl;dr: probably BS in the US. And from what I read the only countries where you can get away with are Russia, Nigeria, etc...
- Theophraustous 8y ago
  I have previously worked at Southwest Airlines HQ as a Customer Relations Supervisor, and when something as serious as booking $1000's of dollars of flights and flying or No-showing several to cover the one they were actually intent on flying the most we would do is issue a charge back and report to our internal fraud prevention dept which would simply add it as a data point to automatically cancel flights similar to this in the future. We would have the fraudster's full name, address, phone number, email, and sometimes their social for their ticket to be valid to get past TSA. Even with all this, nothing more than canceling a Rapid Rewards account or blacklisting their email was actually ever done to the thief.
imgabe 8y ago
My girlfriend's credit card was stolen and used to buy ~$500 of cosmetics. She was able to get the address they were shipped to from the merchant. Not-so-coincidentally, there was a Craigslist ad at that address selling the exact type and quantity of cosmetics that were fraudulently purchased. She called the police and showed all this to them and they basically said that she wasn't a victim of the crime, since she had been made whole by the credit card company and the amount was too small for them to follow up on. So, nothing happened and presumably this person is still out there ripping off other people.
- ajross 8y ago
  I know this sounds frustrating, but it's not so hard to understand. They were right, basically. It's the bank who was harmed, and it needs to be the bank who reports to law enforcement. Local cops serve the local community. They're responsible primarily for deterring/investigating crime that most directly affects the local community. So if they have to choose between chasing some bank's $500 and the perp who broke into a someone's garage, they're going to serve the locally registered voter every time. And that's how we want it. Banks are very good at managing fraud, on the whole. They tend to view it at the level of detection and prevention, not punishment (which is far more expensive). And their techniques work. Total fraud in the credit card industry is actually very low.
  - slededit 8y ago
    The police aren't being asked to enforce a civil action. Theft is a crime and the police do not need the victim to approve action against the criminal. They simply didn't want to follow up.
  - mrep 8y ago
    > It's the bank who was harmed The women would have been out $500 if she had not noticed it and because she did, she had to report it to get the money back. Both of those are problems that she had/would of had to suffer through.
- yourapostasy 8y ago

Waterluvian 8y ago

It's kind of bizarre. I'm no expert but I feel like tackling petty theft is a form of preventative medicine for crime. Getting away with crime might embolden people and reinforce their assumption that you can get away with it. When I was younger some teens would water balloon my family's house a few times a week. We called the police when we thought we figured out who it was. They showed up within an hour, had a chat about it then went to the kids' houses who promptly confessed. It was all handled outside the legal system. Later I told a police officer about this story and asked why they were able to give it so much attention so promptly. He said something along the lines of, "it's easier to deter them now while they're still afraid of their parents' wrath."

dhimes 8y ago
I wonder if it's just economically more advantageous for the credit card companies to absorb the debt and simply nudge interest rates up a bit to recover their losses.
- pakitan 8y ago
  That's exactly what they are doing except the part with "absorbing debt". Banks and credit card companies don't suffer any losses because it's the merchants who absorb them. And that's the root of the problem. Majority of CC fraud is easy to eradicate but banks just have no incentive to do it.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Sounds a little like the economics of employer based health insurance. The parties with negotiating power (companies and health insurance) don't have much incentive to get a good deal for the patient because the patient is captive. Same for merchants and credit card companies.
    - namibj 8y ago
      It could/should tho be changed so that health insurance up to x% of income is tax-deductible, but only if freely chosen on a free market by the employee, with any other constellations being taxed as regular income, without the tax-deductibility. There can still be plans only offered to employees of a specific company, but the issue of preventing an employee from shopping insurance himself is gone.
  - namibj 8y ago
    There are alternatives e.g. girocard/giropay in Germany where the bank of the buyer takes the risk (only if a PIN was used, iirc.). The former is POS, the latter online. Accepting the latter does still cost 3%, and like 20ct or so per transaction. The risk is just not there for the merchant, so this might make sense. Therefore it is in the interest of the buyer's bank to make him adopt tighter security, e.g. with 2FA, in the form of sms or a rubber keyboard/lcd/photodiode based device that enables HID and limited automatic reading of a 5-bar blinking code on the screen to the chip in the bank card, which provides an 8-digit code bound to this specific transaction that has to be entered below the blinking bars. The main benefit there is that banks are iirc. legislated to provide this to everyone, and because merchants have no risk this way they don't ever have to filter potential customers based on perceived creditworthiness and similar factors.
ceejayoz 8y ago
There's a lot of conflicting evidence/opinion on this idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#Criticis...

pjc50 8y ago

It's instructive to compare this to the amount of effort involved in prosecuting completely trivial amounts of drugs. Petty theft, especially of bicycles, gets almost no investigation either.

cubano 8y ago

This is surprising to me for when I was in Florida prison in 2003 there was a man who was serving a 15-year "3 strikes" sentence for stealing a rusty $30 bike off a house porch. I was incredulous, as of course was he, and I asked to look at his paperwork because, frankly, I didn't believe him. Often, I have learned, when you hear of things like this in the system, once you look at the paperwork you find out "oh, on top of stealing the bicycle you also pulled a gun on someone" or something of the like that explains things. Not this time...the guy was a drug addict in his 40's who had a lifetime of petty crap, and I guess the judge was in a shit mood the day of sentencing. Since a porch is attached to a house..an "occupied dwelling" in Florida parlance, this was considered a rather serious crime, thus the 15-year bam! I guess I'm trying to say...it depends upon several factors how things like this are going to be treated. To be honest, I have a few "friends" in Vegas now that are telling me they are really cracking down on fraud and handing out real time behind relatively minor offenses. Just carrying a fake ID in Vegas with priors will get you a 2-5 year state-sponsored vacation.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
I'd much rather live in a society where I have to guard my credit card info an lock my doors than one in which the state will cart people off for nonviolent crimes like stealing a bike or using a fake ID. Petty criminals are much less of a drag on society than the measures society would need to take to get rid of them.
- imgabe 8y ago
  See if you feel that way when it's your bike that gets stolen. Especially if it's your primary mode of transportation. Petty crimes like this ruin otherwise helpful ideas. In my city I've come across a number of Bird scooters that have been vandalized, had the GPS ripped off to presumably steal them for personal use. If nobody does anything about that, an otherwise great idea that could seriously help people get around more easily and reduce traffic and pollution will simply not work, because we allow some people to get away with being assholes.
  - 8y ago

csomar 8y ago

Is this in the US. I'm tempted to call BS on the story. I live in a country with bad policing and these type of crimes are taken seriously. Like if you use the card for 50-100$ purchases, your next will probably jail time. Another point: Did the card owner complain? Usually, when a complaint happen multiple parties are involved. The shipper gets a charge back on his account, so he'll actually care to pursue. MasterCard/Visa also pursue these issues as well as the banks involved in these transactions. tl;dr: probably BS in the US. And from what I read the only countries where you can get away with are Russia, Nigeria, etc...

Theophraustous 8y ago
I have previously worked at Southwest Airlines HQ as a Customer Relations Supervisor, and when something as serious as booking $1000's of dollars of flights and flying or No-showing several to cover the one they were actually intent on flying the most we would do is issue a charge back and report to our internal fraud prevention dept which would simply add it as a data point to automatically cancel flights similar to this in the future. We would have the fraudster's full name, address, phone number, email, and sometimes their social for their ticket to be valid to get past TSA. Even with all this, nothing more than canceling a Rapid Rewards account or blacklisting their email was actually ever done to the thief.

imgabe 8y ago

My girlfriend's credit card was stolen and used to buy ~$500 of cosmetics. She was able to get the address they were shipped to from the merchant. Not-so-coincidentally, there was a Craigslist ad at that address selling the exact type and quantity of cosmetics that were fraudulently purchased. She called the police and showed all this to them and they basically said that she wasn't a victim of the crime, since she had been made whole by the credit card company and the amount was too small for them to follow up on. So, nothing happened and presumably this person is still out there ripping off other people.

ajross 8y ago
I know this sounds frustrating, but it's not so hard to understand. They were right, basically. It's the bank who was harmed, and it needs to be the bank who reports to law enforcement. Local cops serve the local community. They're responsible primarily for deterring/investigating crime that most directly affects the local community. So if they have to choose between chasing some bank's $500 and the perp who broke into a someone's garage, they're going to serve the locally registered voter every time. And that's how we want it. Banks are very good at managing fraud, on the whole. They tend to view it at the level of detection and prevention, not punishment (which is far more expensive). And their techniques work. Total fraud in the credit card industry is actually very low.
- slededit 8y ago
  The police aren't being asked to enforce a civil action. Theft is a crime and the police do not need the victim to approve action against the criminal. They simply didn't want to follow up.
- mrep 8y ago
  > It's the bank who was harmed The women would have been out $500 if she had not noticed it and because she did, she had to report it to get the money back. Both of those are problems that she had/would of had to suffer through.
yourapostasy 8y ago