Why Blockbuster looks at your ID.

Simple Nomad thegnome at nmrc.org
Sat Jul 9 12:23:03 EDT 2005


On Friday 08 July 2005 12:08, Dan Kaminsky wrote:
> >I'm think you wrong on that one. Financial cost and benefit are easily
> >assessed on this, and I think the numbers add up. Credit card fraud
> >costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year, much of which
> >could be eliminated by a change to the sort of system I
> >mention. That's not a small amount of money. Indeed, it is more than
> >enough incentive for a major change.
>
> Credit card fraud has gone *down* since 1992, and is actually falling:
>
> 1992:  $2.6B
> 2003:  $882M
> 2004:  $788M
>
> We're on the order of 4.7 cents on the $100.
>
> http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2005/tc20050621_3238_tc02
>4.htm
>
> If it's any consolation, I was rather surprised myself.

I was very surprised, since my government says it is tons worse.

The U.S. Government is claiming a lot more than these figures when discussing 
identity theft, some high amount like $40b or so. Of course, if you factor in 
check fraud and debit card abuse, which credit card companies treat 
differently and so they may not include, that might account for some of the 
discrepancy, but not all.

The original Nilson Report quoting these figures was from March of this year 
(http://www.nilsonreport.com/issues/2005/830.htm has the cover page), I'd 
like to see the entire article. I wonder if the government's identity theft 
numbers include the cost to combat fraud as opposed to just losses (cost to 
secure transactions, cost to the consumer who has to take time off of work to 
close/reapply/cancel/change perhaps dozens of minute items of personal value 
stored in various databases, cost for the development of Prozac to help 
people cope with the stress of society which includes fraud and identity 
theft, etc).

I'm not saying someone is lying, but someone is not defining context very 
well...

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