With the world of digitalization gaining popularity over the years, transactions have been made easier than ever! Its potential is not just confined to making the cashless transactions so but at the same time, you can go shopping and meet all your requirements in just a distance of your fingertip. However, it has brought in some real issues along with! Although it has helped you with the provision of making the cashless transactions to anyone around the world from the comfort of your home, Credit card fraud is one of the major threats that this easy facility has caused. According to the lvcriminaldefense.com, Beverly Credit Card Act offers consumer protection to the cardholders. Besides, it adds various privacy and security measures as well.
Credit fraud is a punishable offense in the U.S and despite several measures being taken to restrict the scenario, there are still a couple of incidents that take place some or the other day. The United States Government has taken this issue into count seriously and has made a declaration of pursuing aggressive legal actions against individuals who are found to be involved in such credit card fraud schemes. According to the reports from the FBI, 10 individuals were made to encounter a 25 count indictment when proved guilt on one of the largest international credit card fraud schemes, in the year 2013. It is considered as one of the biggest fraud schemes ever charged by the U.S Justice Department.
As a credit card fraud scheme is suspected, the federal agencies start cooperating with each other in order to identify the defendants. They also continue to work so as to uncover evidence for the alleged scheme. Individuals charged are sentenced to prosecution by the Economic Crimes Unit of the U.S. Attorney’s office under the 1984 Credit Card Fraud Act. Each offense could involve prison time and thus, such issues need the immediate intervention of attorneys.
Common reasons for credit fraud
Credit card fraud has become a common crime these days and the frequency of this incident seems to rise tremendously over the years. With the rise of the internet and its merits, there are certain demerits as well that in turn, have provoked the rise of people participating in various schemes to obtain details or use credit without proper authentication. Some common instances include obtaining personal identification information of people and utilizing the same information in someone else’s name. Also, there could be cases when obtaining someone’s credit card information may be used to consider purchases or take advances. Besides, many people create false identities with major credit card bureaus by using fictitious or stolen Social Security numbers is certainly an offense.
Credit card fraud is at its peak and there are different scams available. These days, scammers are getting smarter, they are aware of all kinds of tricks to hijack one’s credit card details, and do all of the activities that assure tracking of phone calls, to emails to that of credit card skimmers as well as wifi hotspots.
If you are charged with fraudulent activity on your credit card, you should at first connect to your credit card company addressing the same.
WiFi hotspots are used very commonly and scammers can at times, create a free WiFi hotspot without a password and just because, we are extremely intended to use free hotspots, finding a wifi network often lures us to connect to it. That’s when we get caught and if we access our credit card online, your login details may get acquired and credit card info can also be trapped by these frauds. As customers, we often let it go and do not count!
Once your personal information is available to the fraudsters, they may do anything and everything with those, tight from calling your credit card company or making a call to the bank as well as make purchases.
What to do when detected by a fraud activist?
• At first, you should protect yourself from being scammed. Amidst all the circumstances that you go through, vigilance could be the only essential key that would assist you to track things that you might have lost, so that you can at least make out what’s going wrong!
• Consider a painless strategy and there could be no easy way for that than having your mobile bank apps downloaded in your device. It lets you learn about your credit and debit card transactions so that even if a mishap occurs, you will be able to know where did your money goes, and thus, focus upon taking necessary actions immediately.
• Connect to your credit card company as soon as you notice something that’s going out of your order. Just as you get an instinct that things aren’t going right, connect to your credit card company. There are several credit card companies that offer zero-liability policies to their customers and feature federal protection as well.
• Last but not the least, if you have been a victim of identity theft, connect to the FTC or credit card bureaus.