Identity Theft
The first form of credit card hijacking is basically identity theft, which is the deliberate assumption of another person's identity. Identity theft is usually the result of serious breaches of privacy and often involves the victim compromising a great deal of financial and personal information allowing the thief to charge an existing credit card account or open up new credit card accounts in the name of the victim. Traditionally, methods of identity theft for credit card hijacking have involved mail interception or skimming of credit card data. As online transaction volumes increase, new methods for hijacking identities for credit card fraud include phishing and the use of spyware and botnets.
Read more about this topic: Credit Card Hijacking
Famous quotes containing the words identity and/or theft:
“One of the most highly valued functions of used parents these days is to be the villains of their children’s lives, the people the child blames for any shortcomings or disappointments. But if your identity comes from your parents’ failings, then you remain forever a member of the child generation, stuck and unable to move on to an adulthood in which you identify yourself in terms of what you do, not what has been done to you.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“Men are not therefore put to death, or punished for that their theft proceedeth from election; but because it was noxious and contrary to men’s preservation, and the punishment conducing to the preservation of the rest, inasmuch as to punish those that do voluntary hurt, and none else, frameth and maketh men’s wills such as men would have them.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)