The Latest in Credit Card Hacks.

Corporate Identity fraud has been exposed once more in the scale in which it exists: 1 in 7 companies currently meets the most minimalistic of processing security standards that the major credit cards arbitrarily came up with to avoid government regulation, or so says Jordan Robertson of the Associated Press. The rest don’t even come close.

For his whole article feel free to wander over here: http://ca.lifestyle.yahoo.com/family-relationships/articles/archive/cp/home_family-weak_security_opens_door_to_credit_card_hacks.

Here’s the problem – the North American market has tried desperately to use the excuse that the consumer is willing to pay for the titanic cost of global business fraud and money laundering in exchange for ‘low-cost,’ ‘speedy’ transactions.

The reality is that this not only exposes us to vast amounts of personal, corporate, and governmental risk, it funds exactly those criminals that we have whole departments desperately trying to forestall, not the least of which is the Department of Homeland Security.

The reality is that when 911 happened it didn’t take long before Osama Bin Laden’s net worth was estimated to be about $300 million USD. The reality is that our federal and local law enforcement officers discovered that local groups were using credit card frauds, identity theft and other scams in order to raise funds for overseas terror groups to continue to fight against us by raising the money right here in the US through these kinds of crimes. The reality is that the technology involved in the encryption used by those that are PCI compliant is so weak that it is broken daily by professionals hired by organized crime to pilfer the resources of anyone using the banking and credit system. The reality is that we are allowing our financial system to pay the bad guys to inflict damage to us.

CNN has reported that since they started tracking it in 2008, the US economy alone has lost over 3 million jobs, a large number of those in the financial services field. The reality is that the same people who thought extending their investments into risky derivatives, NINJA loans, Ponzi-schemes, and so on, were and are the same people telling you that you don’t need to worry about the level of security on your transaction processing.

The reality is that this is the same level of encryption planned for your health records when they become electronically filed as explained by our President and the new Secretary of Health.

The reality is that companies are being taken out of business entirely because fraud is perpetrated against them and their clients, often in their own names, by these kinds of hacks and other identifiable and preventable causes, and that the jobs that these companies would otherwise be offering in a fair and reputable marketplace would be in companies that were experiencing growth, that would not have needed to be lost, that were not lost by the general economic downturn.

It is identical to walking to the center of a major business center or shopping mall, putting a blindfold on, spinning around and around, and wherever you stop, pointing a finger at whatever store is in front of you and saying that’s the store that’s closing today because of unrestrained fraud perpetrated against them, and that we’re ‘ok with that.’

And here’s the next line of logic I want to leave you with: if you’re at all listening to the news these days, you have had to have heard about the increasingly strained relations with North Korea. You may or may not have heard or remember that part of the concern about their situation is that they are the world’s number one source of fake US currency, which they use to float their country’s finances. As most major global banks will not have anything to do with them, they spend this money through shadier institutions with much shadier contacts and clients than we’d like to know about. They also produce fake credit cards by the score for exactly the same purpose. They also have nuclear weapons and are currently threatening us with them. So…..where’s the money coming from for this threat?

This begs the question, then, which is more important to you? The lies of the (same) bankers and financiers who tell you it’s too expensive and time consuming to fix (that are also responsible for our current financial mess), or the cost of a prospective nuclear winter caused by a regime we know has the weapons and the ‘crazy’ genes to do it?

And the follow up question, of course, is what do we plan to do to fix it? And are we ready to let them put our health records and biometric data (used in secure documents like passports and social security cards) in the same hands?

Are we really ready to finally admit that, yes, Virginia, there really is a Bad Guy?