Paying by plastic not safe anymore

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Mumbai: Supratik Chakraborty was shocked after receiving a credit card bill of about Rs 1,20,000, all spent on buying as many as 22 air tickets in just 30 minutes.

Chakraborty, a young IIT Powai computer sciences professor, was billed for 21 Kingfisher airlines tickets and a Spice Jet ticket bought on September 29, a purchase, he says, he never made.

To make it worse, no one at his bank found this unusual.

“Such suspicious transactions of over Rs 1 lakh took place within half an hour and there were no alerts from Citibank,” Chakraborty said.

So, what does it take for a fraudster to commit an online fraud using a credit card? Sixteen digits and the card verification value (CVV) number printed on the back of the credit card, which are easily accessible.

However, the big question is what is the need to print the CVV number on the credit card.

Banks say the CVV number is needed to ensure the customer actually possesses the card while making the purchase. But in reality anyone can quickly note the digits on a card and make it his own. This is especially the case on the Internet, with online shopping sites not asking for a two-factor identification, where the chances of fraud are very high.

“The second factor identification should ask for information which is known only to the consumer,” Head, Computer Science Department, IIT Powai, G Sivakumar said.

Interestingly, online purchases with a debit card are much safer because transactions take place on the bank's website rather than the merchant's.

Banks always ask for a customer identification number and the net-banking password is unique only to the customer.

Chakraborty is one of four such victims from Powai alone and although his loss is covered by Citibank, cases like these are now one of the biggest headache for credit card companies.