Thieves Snatch Billions in Credit Card Fraud

LOS ANGELES, June 3, 2009— -- For years, crimes have followed the same age old mantra: wrong place at the wrong time. For someone to commit a crime against someone else, they had to be physically in the same area. But that's no longer the case; it's now easier than ever to be victim of a crime, particularly identity theft, without even realizing it.

Identity thieves snatch tens of billions dollars a year through credit card fraud, either outright, or by selling your card information to other crooks across the globe. The perpetrators come from a loosely organized international underworld working beyond the reach of the law and without limits.

"They can sit in an apartment in Kiev ... and steal your identity and you're going to be in a world of hurt," said Dan Clements, founder of Card Cops, a company that has been tracking hackers who buy and sell people's identities. "They blatantly ... trade credit cards. They trade social security numbers. They trade debit card pin numbers."

Card Cops has been tracking hackers' activity for a decade. Crooks from all over the world meet in Internet chat rooms, in what almost looks like an underground stock market.

"Credit cards are commodity items," Clements said. "They can go for as little as $2 or $3 for a regular credit card. If you have a platinum card, it may be for $10 or $20. It's big business. They make a lot of money. There are people here that claim to make $20,000 to $30,000 a month selling these resources in these chat rooms."

The chat rooms operate like a commodity floor, where information is openly traded, and the hackers who carry out identity theft usually live in another part of the world.

"It's a global market," Clements said. "It's like a bazaar where you can buy anything at any time."

The Card Cops should know: They entered the business of protecting consumers and merchants from identity theft because many of them were scammed themselves when they worked together at another Internet company.

To help understand how fast a thief can siphon money from an account, ABC News experimentally opened a Visa account. It only took 15 minutes before a hacker got hungry.

"We had a hit from a retailer in Massachusetts," said Clements. The culprit used the credit card number to buy Dominos Pizza. "So there is your charge for $39.76. It looks like some kid might have found the card in this chat room and decided to buy his buddies pizzas."