Carding is one of the most dangerous types of frauds nowadays. The point of carding is in stealing all the information required to make a purchase with someone’s credit or debit card. Carders are the people who collect and use this information. The worst point about carding is that it is hard to fight with. The carders hide their identities and regular cardholders are almost never protected from carders.
The carders have different ways of obtaining the necessary information. They might create a fake version of a bank’s website, or simply scan someone’s card with their terminals. The most critical weakness of cardholders is that they might not know their data is stolen.
Carders usually have not only to gain access to the number of the credit or debit card, expiration date and cardholder’s name, but also to the payment authentication instruments, which might be a mobile phone, for example.
This gives time for the carders to take different kinds of actions with the stolen card data. They might sell it in the darknet, or buy something online, using a fake delivery address or another person to collect the parcel, or wait until a bigger sum arrives at the selected card. Sooner or later, the cardholder gets robbed with having no chance to return the money.
Carding is a fraud forbidden by law, which is why carders try so hard to disguise themselves. They use proxy servers, fake addresses, other people or even gain access to other people’s computers to perform their illegal operations secretly.
Of course, the law enforcement agencies try to fight with carders and invent new ways to track them down, but the carders are usually one step ahead as they are in most cases high quality IT specialists. The banks and online shops, which carders use for phishing also try to protect their customers and their reputation by preventing data losses and warning people about carding.
However, for most people it is almost impossible to fully protect themselves from the scammers. A cardholder may not even make purchases with his card or not enter any card information, when his card is stolen. Sometimes carders hack bank’s databases causing huge financial and reputational losses for such banks. They might also simply steal the password of one’s social media page and this will lead to the card information, as people usually have the same passwords on multiple websites. In some cases, carders are even able to get one’s social security number without letting the person know it.