As the holiday season gets into gear, online retailers are seeing an increase in credit card fraud attempts. Our sources tell us the orders use real names and credit card information, but attempt to ship to alternate addresses. At this time of year with many people sending gifts to other addresses, orders like these are more likely to slip through the cracks at some retailers.For the most part, the recipients aren’t the fraudsters, they are merely dupes and remailers who then ship the packages out of the country. Some throw-away emails being used recently at Buy.com, Apple.com and others (all of whom caught the scam and did not ship product) were as follows:

  • marquis_hurley98@yahoo.de
  • tomas_cannon76@yahoo.com
  • orlando_meyers98@yahoo.com
  • jake_houston67@yahoo.com
  • isaac_slater33@yahoo.com
  • middleeastempire@gmail.com
  • justed192@yahoo.com
  • jayden_barnett66@yahoo.com
  • dandanocallaghan@aol.com
  • clayton_barber81@yahoo.com
  • kristy.abernathy85@gmail.com
  • marcelo_wagner6@yahoo.com

If you are an online retailer and you have orders from any of these email addresses, beware. You’ll likely be targeted for more than one order under different names.The real question retails we talk to have is this: why won’t Visa, MasterCard, AmericanExpress, the FBI, or local police do anything about this? Reports to the authorities go largely unanswered and the card companies just cancel the card but don’t notify other retailers who may have approvals on the same card.