Computer Chip Credit Cards – What it Means for Credit Card Security

Have you ever received a call from Visa, American Express, or another credit card company telling you that your credit card information was hacked and your card is being cancelled while new replacement cards are sent? I have, and it can be a hassle resolving the fraudulent charges and waiting for a new card. And it’s an even bigger hassle for the credit card company who has to track down where the card was used to try to get the money back to minimize their losses. However, due to new technology, the amount of fraudulent charges will be drastically decreasing. By the end of 2015, US financial institutions will have distributed more than 600 million chip cards—a credit card with a computer chip embedded into the card that will increase its security and decrease consumer fraud. A recent article in The Deseret News highlights why the new cards are becoming more popular and what it means for consumers.

The Hospital Room Incident: Did Lance Armstrong Pay Off Doctors to Remain Silent?

While it has been several months since we posted about the Lance Armstrong investigation (see this link for previous posts), the case against Armstrong continues to grow. A recent article in the Daily Camera discusses what is known as “The Hospital Room Incident.” This article discusses why the U.S. Government subpoenaed his medical records from the Indiana University School of Medicine. Allegations are that Armstrong paid off his doctor to remain silent through a donation to his medical school.

Detecting Fraud in Academic Research

The scientific community is often considered to be less filled with fraud than other disciplines. Typically when we think of fraud, we think of it occurring in businesses and think of someone walking away with a lot of money. However, fraud can also easily happen in academic research (see these previous posts for examples) where someone walks away with a lot of published papers. Discover Magazine recently posted an article titled The Perfect Scientific Crime. The article outlines several ways that someone could commit fraud without being detected by creating and using fictitious data. The purpose of the article, however, is not to help fraudsters, but rather to point out a few things that others should be aware of to help deter fraud in the academic community.

Business Email Fraud

According to the FBI, companies worldwide have lost more than $1 billion from October 2013 through June 2015 due to business email fraud, an increasingly popular fraud tactic used by criminals to infiltrate a company’s email system and request large sums of money via wire transfer. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal discusses business email fraud in further detail. For this type of fraud, emails typically come from a vendor that the company does business with regularly, or sometimes they even come from the CEO of the company with instructions of how and where to wire the money. While it is sometimes possible to find errors in the email and identify the fraud, other times it can be impossible to detect without additional investigation. Because the fraud can be nearly impossible to detect, it is necessary to use extra precautions and sound security procedures whenever companies wire money.