AmEx unveiled some privacy and security initiatives, leading off with a program of disposable credit-card numbers that will be available to cardholders within a month. The scheme addresses only a few of the real online threats to consumers' financial data and privacy, but the press was too busy praising AmEx's creativity to point this out.
Online merchants pay higher fees to credit-card companies because they incur higher rates of fraud.
While AmEx's one-use credit card number promises to lower this risk for online merchants, no one was talking about the company lowering its fees because of lowered risk, as the Wall Street Journal noted. CNET followed up with an analysis by the Meta Group, which took a harder look at the overall risk environment. None of the AmEx coverage mentioned today's other credit-card fraud story. The scammers inserted phony porn charges on the accounts of at least 900,000 cardholders, half of whom don't even own computers. The Wall Street Journal attempted to get comments from the three fraudsters.