Credit Card Fraud Prevention for Merchants

It happens after hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, and earthquakes. The world scrambles to donate help, supplies and money. That’s a good thing, of course. Unfortunately, these disasters also bring the scammers out in force.

Please do some research before donating to ANY relief effort that appears to be set up specifically for aid to Haiti. There will be scammers out there setting up websites and sending out tens of thousands of spam email. These guys will get your money and your credit card information and use it to drain you of your hard-earned money.

If you want to make donations, stick with the Red Cross, known church-organized relief efforts and other reputable organizations. Please use extreme caution when making donations to Haiti relief.

In the last three hours, I have seen a couple of press releases saying that AT&T has set up a way to text message donations. I have confirmed this on the AT&T webisite.

Wireless customers of AT&T* (NYSE:T) can send $10 donations to the Red Cross International Relief Fund by typing the word HAITI and sending it to 90999 via text message from their mobile device. Standard text messaging rates may apply.

A confirmation message will arrive within a few minutes, to which the customer replies “yes” to finalize the donation.

100 percent of all money donated will be passed on to the Red Cross.

Also, there is some good advice here.

Cash often serves as the best donation. Slate.com notes, “First responders call the deluge of unsolicited goods they receive the ’second disaster,’ as shipping, sorting, storing and distributing the goods takes valuable staff time away from other necessary tasks.”

If I identify any suspected Haitian relief scams, I will attempt to verify them as legitimate and report the results here. I urge you to bookmark or subscribe to the RSS feed and check back. But don’t assume that if a relief effort you’re checking out isn’t here, that it’s a good one.

Also – please use the comments to report any relief effort that you suspect. We’ll do our best to check them out.

Update

Here is CNN’s list of recognized legitimate relief efforts.

There’s no question that the reported number of data breaches has decreased in 2009. But is it just the reported cases or is it the actual number of breaches? Either way, it raises the question of why. Solar flares?

Probably not solar flares; at least that would be my guess. I suspect that the article at at the Open Security Foundation doesn’t think so either but they’ve done a good job of listing possible reasons. They mention better security, but don’t seem to analyze it much.

I’d admit that they can only analyze reported breaches. If they aren’t reported, we don’t know about them unless we have some insider information. I’d like to think that the number of breaches are really decreasing – but I can’t. I have to think it’s at least one of the Open Security Foundation’s possibilities.

Some of the article is meant to be humorous but it’s still a good read.