A frightening example of just how many credit card numbers are stolen

I’ve had an incredibly annoying experience recently. Scammers have attempted to make thousands upon thousands purchases from this website with stolen credit card numbers.

They use a tactic crooks employ of purchasing the least expensive thing on a website to see if the purchase goes through. If that works, they’ll buy more expensive things and have them shipped immediately.

Now, if you’re familiar with this website, you know there really isn’t much for sale besides newsletter memberships and e-guides. Of course, since most of this illegal activity is completely automated, the bots searching for websites with stores don’t know that.

On three separate occasions so far, these crooks have spent two or three-hour blocks making purchase after purchase after purchase. I”m talking about 10 or 20 attempts to buy something every minute. Now, unless my .99 guide to Zoom has suddenly become the most in-demand bestseller around, something fishy is going on. What’s scarier is that each of these purchases comes with a different name and a different credit card number. They have that many stolen credit card numbers in their database.

The scam bot creates an alleged email address for the user and attempts to make a purchase. However, since my site requires both a security code and an exact match for the shipping address and the credit card (even though I don’t ship anything physically), these orders all failed.

I know many of you remember back when I worked at WorldStart, but you might not know that it was scam purchases like these that ultimately forced WorldStart to close its doors. Crooks with fake credit cards purchased close to $50,0000 worth of tablets and had them sent to drop points that look like regular addresses all over the country. But they were actually mailboxes that forwarded purchases overseas. By the time the legitimate credit card holders contested the charges, the tablets had been shipped and sent on overseas to the destinations of the crooks’ choosing. The company was forced to refund the money and out everything they had spent purchasing and shipping the tablets.

Scammers like this do untold amounts of damage to consumers and companies. That’s why it’s essential for you to enable multi-factor authentication on your bank accounts and credit cards.

You should also be understanding and grateful for any verification hoops you may have to jump through when making purchases. Punching in a code or confirming something in an app may take extra time, but it can protect you from scammers.

Fortunately, thanks to my site security, all I have to worry about is deleting failed orders.