The credit card has been around in its modern form from approx the 1950’s, with its beginnings described in 1887 in an Utopian novel by Edward Bellamy. In the 1920’s Western Union issued charge cards to it’s owners, and there were various other cards available to owners for specific purposes.
It was not until the 1950’s and 60’s when the birth of names such as American Express, Visa and Mastercard, is when the real money started to exchange hands.
With the exchange of monies also comes fraud. In recent times Credit Card fraud is operated by sophisticated criminal gangs using sophisticated electronic equipment.
Credit Card skimmers have been around for a while now, where electronic equipment is used in order to read the magnetic strip on the card. In order to protect themselves banks have resorted to also using microchips in cards as an added safety feature.
Many banks, eg. Mastercard and Visa have been using this technology since its commercial availability in 1994, but NOT so in Australia.
Security in Australia regarding this matter is deliberately lax. Criminals have figured this out a lonf time ago, and many have moved their operations to Australia.
At a McDonald’s outlet in Perth, the NCR card readers have been tampered with, and the card details have been taken (method known to corpau, but NOT disclosed for obvious reasons), and approximately 6,000 card holders have had monies stolen from their accounts. This crime ring was headed by Romanians.
Banks do not wear the cost of this fraud, but rather this is made up by higher bank fees to customers and other various methods employed to regain the profits lost. In the end it's the customers that are being ripped off.
The real extent of Credit Card Fraud is played down by the mass media, in order for the masses NOT to panic, and NOT ask too many questions.
Australia offers one of the easiest ways to commit bank fraud.
corpau.
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