Recently, my mother-in-law discovered that a pretty significant piece of jewelry had gone missing. There had been a number of construction workers in the house for a few weeks and when she went to get her jewelry, it was gone. After searching like a crazy person under/in/on top of everything, she called the police.

A report from Europol states that payment card fraud is a low-risk and highly profitable criminal activity that brings EU-based organized crime groups a yearly income of around 1.5 billion euros. These criminal assets can be invested in further developing criminal techniques, used to finance other criminal activities, or even facilitate the start-up of legal businesses.

A report from Europol states that payment card fraud is a low-risk and highly profitable criminal activity that brings EU-based organized crime groups a yearly income of around 1.5 billion euros. These criminal assets can be invested in further developing criminal techniques, used to finance other criminal activities, or even facilitate the start-up of legal businesses.

The 2012 Global Card Fraud Survey by ACI Worldwide represents the insights and opinions of more than 5200 card holders from 17 countries and focuses exclusively on the impact to the card holder and their state of mind. Residents of Mexico and the United States reported the highest rate of card fraud experience. Some of the survey’s other key findings include:

For any cave-dwelling, living-under-a-rock, head-in-the-sand, naïve, under-informed members of society who aren’t paying attention, we have serious cyber-security issues on our hands.

Black hat hackers, who break into networks to steal for financial gain, are wreaking havoc on banks, retailers, online gaming websites, and social media. Black hats cost these companies and their clients billions of dollars every year. They are using stolen usernames and passwords to transfer money through wire transfers, Automated Clearing House (ACH) and through billing fraud.