Discovering credit card fraud methods in online tutorials
Gert Jan van Hardeveld, Craig Webber, Kieron O’Hara · 2016
Online underground forums allow for the sharing of up-to-date knowledge on how to optimally commit an online crime. Tutorials focusing on specific online crimes are commonplace and provide members of underground communities with all the information needed to engage in illicit transactions. In this article, tutorials that focus on the online process of cashing out stolen credit card details, i.e. carding, will be analysed. A crime script analysis will reveal the most common ways in which carding is executed. We found that if these paths are meticulously followed, interceptive opportunities are limited for law enforcement. Cases of deviation from these paths are not uncommon, which renders situational crime prevention measures less effective. As a potential solution, we propose the uptake of prospect theory as an analytical tool to account for deviations from the criminal optimal norm. In future work, such a method could better account for all the various ways in which fraudulent activity is committed and contribute to thinking about new preventive measures.