If the phish have been biting a little too hard for you lately, take heart: MasterCard agrees with you. And they've rounded up a group of Internet, law enforcement, and academic heavies for a conference that begins today at the Manchester Grand Hyatt, to take on cyberspace's growing phishing problem and other kinds of online identity theft and payment trouble.
"With existing and emerging fraud schemes breaking every day," said MasterCard senior vice president of security and risk Sergio Pinon, "navigating the tide of change requires extensive understanding of the tools and strategies necessary to combat payment systems fraud."
Phishing, of course, is the scam that involves e-mails or Web pages made to resemble actual company communications or pages that try to lure Netizens into giving up their personal financial and credit information. The most recently-noted such phish involves a round of e-mails made to resemble advisories from Citibank.
MasterCard executives will be joined as symposium speakers by U.S. Postal Inspection Service official Lee Heath, Wayne Abernathy of the U.S. Treasury Department, John Large of the Secret Service, and Utica College Economic Crime Institute chief Dr. Gary Gordon, among others. Over three hundred Internet, law enforcement, financial, and related industry professionals were expected to attend the symposium.
Phishing may be the current hot button, but the symposium is also expected to address other forms of identity and commerce fraud and ATM fraud, as well as new developments in chip and credit product technology.
MasterCard was also expected to announce a new partnership it hopes will mean "a fundamental shift" in how the credit industry handles new forms of payment fraud. The adult Internet industry's recent battles with the credit industry have often included raising questions as to how both sides can redress payment fraud without freezing the adult Internet out of credit processing altogether, especially since credit companies began tightening chargeback restrictions on adult businesses in the last two years.
"We are now at the point where fraud prevention and fraud containment are no longer enough," Pinon said during his symposium announcement, though formal details of the partnership were not disclosed. "Our new partnership enables us to aggressively shut down online fraud schemes before card accounts are compromised and identities are stolen."
The symposium will run today through June 24.
