The fraudsters responsible for stealing account information from Global Payments earlier this year are apparently using prepaid cards to cash in on the compromised account data they now hold.
According to Brian Krebs — the former Washington Post tech writer who first broke the Global Payments breach story — the fraudsters traveled to Las Vegas and surrounding areas earlier this year to buy branded prepaid cards from a grocery store operation owned by Safeway.
“The fraudsters were coming to the stores to buy low-denomination Safeway branded prepaid cards, and then encoding debit card accounts issued by USB onto the magnetic stripe on the backs of the prepaid cards,” Krebs explains. “The thieves then used those cards to purchase additional prepaid cards with much higher values, which were then used to buy electronics and other high-priced goods from other retailers.”
Read the full story here.
