Credit Card Fraud Types

If you have not yourself experienced a credit card fraud, then you at least must have heard about some either from people you known or from newspaper reports. This article will explain in detail the primary kinds of credit card fraud one can perform.

The term credit card fraud can be defined as the umbrella term for all kinds of deceptive practices by credit card companies or people with the goal of taking fraudulent advantage of each other. Such frauds end up causing monetary losses or create embarrassing situation for the body in the receiving end; it can be the credit card company or a person. Below we have mentioned the most commonly occurring credit card fraud types:

Application fraud:

Individuals performing application fraud include false facts during their credit card application procedure. They do so either for hiding their bad credit score or for getting a high spending limit. According to experts, application fraud can be of 2 kinds: financial fraud (in which the applicant provides false facts about his financial status for acquiring a credit card) and assumed identity (in which the applicant steals someone else’s identity while applying for the card.

Electronic or manual card imprints:

Fraudulent merchants often create electronic or manual imprints of credit cards during transactions. Usually, these fraudulent merchants imprint the pertinent facts either from magnetic stripes present in the credit cards’ back or from the front of the credit cards. These imprints allow the merchants to use the credit cards later for making fraudulent transactions. There are also instances where the imprinted data from the legitimate cards have been used for encoding fake cards. To avoid any such situation one must keep a close eye on a merchant while he is swapping the card.

Never received issues:

‘Never received issues’ describe a fraudulent activity in which the credit card gets stolen when in transit and used illegally by some other individual.