When it comes to crooked online consumers New York City ranks number one in the nation, followed by Miami and Los Angeles, according to survey of companies victimized by online consumer fraud, which was conducted by Mountain View, CA-based CyberSource Corp.
The Big Apple had the highest rate of credit card fraud, stolen credit cards and improperly obtained credit information for online orders in the survey, more than twice as many as Miami and Los Angeles and 13 times higher than the San Francisco Bay area. Twenty-six percent of the instances of reported fraud were from New York.
“Few merchants will publicly discuss this, but it’s no secret that some areas of the country have tarnished reputations due to a high incidence of e-commerce fraud,” said Doug Schwegman, director of market intelligence at CyberSource.
One reason why Internet credit fraud is higher in New York may be the high concentration of trans-shippers in the region, a person who receives orders fraudulently for forwarding other parts of the world, especially Nigeria, Indonesia and parts of Eastern Europe, according to Schwegman.
In other fraud related news, the California Department of Corporations has formed an Escrow Fraud Task Force to coordinate fraud prevention and enforcement activities between state and federal authorities. Escrow services collect payment for companies unable to process credit card orders online, but a number of fraudulent operations have cropped up on the Internet. California has taken enforcement actions against 33 such escrow providers in an effort to shut them down.
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