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As I see it there's two things at play here that feed into one another: 1. The re-framing by financial institutions of them being defrauded as "identity theft"

As I see it there's two things at play here that feed into one another: 1. The re-framing by financial institutions of them being defrauded as "identity theft" and pushing this responsibility onto their customers. 2. Because of the above, the data can be valuable, incentivizing the compromise. Re 1: Note that credit card companies have had this problem for ages and treated it as fraud for decades, which is why established card companies can have very reasonable processes to cancel transactions, mark some as fraudulent, and probably why they have reversible transactions. However, because of the rest of the industry card companies now appear to be jumping on board with the "identity theft" concept. By collectively not treating it seriously and essentially letting it happen and inconveniencing their customers instead of the vendors, banks have essentially washed their hands of it and give zero incentives to the vendors to seriously try to protect the data. If every transaction marked fraudulent meant the vendor didn't get the money, there would be a lot more serious action here.

mistrial9 5y ago
agree - add to that a system side-effect -- with strong consumer protection and easily reversed transactions, plus the financial policy to cover the dollars involved, that leads to a big increase of crooked insiders doing the fraud transactions. Without evidence, I believe that VISA and MasterCard in the early days, found that the massive money they made on consumer credit was worth the sort-of-unstoppable insider scamming as a "cost of doing business"
smorgusofborg 5y ago
I'm not sure I agree with your last point. The merchants have historically been powerless but the merchant side bank ends up patching things up to fix it's own costs. Often this patching means penalizing merchants with products that are fun to buy fraudulently for failures that originated or could only have been detected at the buyer's bank.
teddyh 5y ago
“Damn you, masquerading as hundreds, if not thousands, of customers! How dare you steal their identities!” — Mitchell & Webb, Identity Theft (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c57WKxeELY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c57WKxeELY)
- tsol 5y ago
  Lol. This is a clever way of putting it. Actually helped me understand some of this
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    The video should be required to accompany any article about “identify theft” to raise political awareness that a business being defrauded should be the business’s problem. Edit: the business and law enforcement/court system’s problem. But certainly not an uninvolved individual’s problem.
tablespoon 5y ago
> Note that credit card companies have had this problem for ages and treated it as fraud for decades, which is why established card companies can have very reasonable processes to cancel transactions, mark some as fraudulent, and probably why they have reversible transactions. Do they do that of their own volition, or because there's some legal requirement forcing them to?
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  If someone steals from the debitcard, they steal your money. If someone steals from your credit card, that's not your money, it's the bank's money - the bank was trying to give you a loan and gave it to the wrong person. That's their problem. If we didn't have this rule, there would be unlimited rampant fraud - you don't just loose all you have, you loose what you haven't. We would suddenly find out that we are a million dollars in debt for no reason.
- bcrosby95 5y ago
  Credit cards are heavily regulated in the USA and, yes, there is a legal requirement here. No such requirements exists for debit cards. This is why I hate them. But from what I can tell, most people don't seem to have a problem getting fraud reversed.
tessierashpool 5y ago
> The re-framing by financial institutions of them being defrauded as "identity theft" and pushing this responsibility onto their customers. as with so many other things, elite impunity is the fundamental problem. for the banks to be putting their own failures of due diligence on consumers’ heads is as an outrage and an absurdity. it shouldn’t even be possible. if they screw up, they should face the consequences of their incompetence. but they don’t. after the Equifax breach, the CEO retired with $90M. $90M for presiding over a corporation whose entire business model is an exemption from defamation law, screwing it up, blaming someone else down the line, and exposing millions to so-called “identity theft” —- in other words, millions of people now have an uncompensated permanent commitment to doing due diligence for countless banks, car dealerships, and even Walmarts throughout the country. > collectively not treating it seriously and essentially letting it happen the modus operandi for the whole problem space

mistrial9 5y ago

agree - add to that a system side-effect -- with strong consumer protection and easily reversed transactions, plus the financial policy to cover the dollars involved, that leads to a big increase of crooked insiders doing the fraud transactions. Without evidence, I believe that VISA and MasterCard in the early days, found that the massive money they made on consumer credit was worth the sort-of-unstoppable insider scamming as a "cost of doing business"

smorgusofborg 5y ago

I'm not sure I agree with your last point. The merchants have historically been powerless but the merchant side bank ends up patching things up to fix it's own costs. Often this patching means penalizing merchants with products that are fun to buy fraudulently for failures that originated or could only have been detected at the buyer's bank.

teddyh 5y ago

“Damn you, masquerading as hundreds, if not thousands, of customers! How dare you steal their identities!” — Mitchell & Webb, Identity Theft (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c57WKxeELY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c57WKxeELY)

tsol 5y ago
Lol. This is a clever way of putting it. Actually helped me understand some of this
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  The video should be required to accompany any article about “identify theft” to raise political awareness that a business being defrauded should be the business’s problem. Edit: the business and law enforcement/court system’s problem. But certainly not an uninvolved individual’s problem.

tablespoon 5y ago

> Note that credit card companies have had this problem for ages and treated it as fraud for decades, which is why established card companies can have very reasonable processes to cancel transactions, mark some as fraudulent, and probably why they have reversible transactions. Do they do that of their own volition, or because there's some legal requirement forcing them to?

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
If someone steals from the debitcard, they steal your money. If someone steals from your credit card, that's not your money, it's the bank's money - the bank was trying to give you a loan and gave it to the wrong person. That's their problem. If we didn't have this rule, there would be unlimited rampant fraud - you don't just loose all you have, you loose what you haven't. We would suddenly find out that we are a million dollars in debt for no reason.
bcrosby95 5y ago
Credit cards are heavily regulated in the USA and, yes, there is a legal requirement here. No such requirements exists for debit cards. This is why I hate them. But from what I can tell, most people don't seem to have a problem getting fraud reversed.

tessierashpool 5y ago

> The re-framing by financial institutions of them being defrauded as "identity theft" and pushing this responsibility onto their customers. as with so many other things, elite impunity is the fundamental problem. for the banks to be putting their own failures of due diligence on consumers’ heads is as an outrage and an absurdity. it shouldn’t even be possible. if they screw up, they should face the consequences of their incompetence. but they don’t. after the Equifax breach, the CEO retired with $90M. $90M for presiding over a corporation whose entire business model is an exemption from defamation law, screwing it up, blaming someone else down the line, and exposing millions to so-called “identity theft” —- in other words, millions of people now have an uncompensated permanent commitment to doing due diligence for countless banks, car dealerships, and even Walmarts throughout the country. > collectively not treating it seriously and essentially letting it happen the modus operandi for the whole problem space