Delaware and Florida are home to the highest rates of attempted credit card fraud, while Alaskans are the most likely to have their card details used fraudsters, according to a new report.
Sift Science, a San Francisco-based company that provides anti-fraud software to online businesses including Airbnb, Wayfair and Kickstarter, analyzed 1.3 million card transactions on more than 6,000 sites to determine where fraud is most common.
The South — with Florida in the lead — dominates as the region home to the highest rates of fraud attempts.
Every southern state made it to the company’s top 20 list. The northern outliers were Delaware and New York with 19.2% and 15.2% rates, respectively.
Alaska, however, leads the country with the highest rate of people whose stolen card details are used in fraud attempts, according to the report.
New York state, which made the top ten list, was also home to huge regional differences. When zooming in closer than the state level, the report found people living in the New York City borough of the Bronx had the highest rate of hacked credit cards in the country. Those in the town of Westbury, located just 20 miles away on Long Island, had the country’s lowest rate.
Sift Science said in a blog post that the high rate in the Bronx shows how fraudsters often target people in tight, concentrated groups.
“We’ve seen networks of fraudsters (fraud rings) cluster in small geographical areas. We’ve also seen single fraudsters attack multiple sites – multiple times – using the same stolen credit card information,” the company wrote. “In other words, a small number of fraudsters could be responsible for a large, concentrated volume of bad transactions. That’s why pooling data from across a large and diverse network is key to successfully stopping fraud.”
The Federal Trade Commission received more than 1.2 millions reports of fraud in 2015, 16% of which were related to identity theft and credit card fraud.
http://blog.siftscience.com/2016/fraud-united-states-rankings/
