An old wives` tale says that too much sex will make you blind. While few believe that today, too many visits to porn sites may well result in your being robbed blind.
"Visiting porn sites exposes Internet surfers to a high risk of being defrauded," says veteran banking systems developer Gordon Ashby, MD of Virtual Card Services (VCS), a leading South African electronic payment gateway company.
"Criminals are using transactions in so-called adult images as a cover for fraud on a major scale. And the odds with this type of fraud are heavily stacked in the fraudster`s favour."
Typically what happens is that a customer pays for, say, an adult image by credit card. From then on, one of three things may happen:
a. You get billed more than you were originally asked to pay.
b. You are sent a new image every month. You may think it`s free and find out only later that your card has been debited again. Should you complain, you will be told that you purchased an annual subscription. If you really insist, the porn site may agree to "terminate" your membership, but you`ll battle to get back the money you have already paid.
c. Your card may be debited with irregular small amounts for goods and services you have never bought.
"Many people fail to check their billing statements properly and so fail to detect these fraudulent transactions timeously," says Ashby. "If you do find irregular transaction, you should contest the payment with your card`s issuing bank. If the transaction is fairly recent - typically less than two months old - this may be successful.
"Many people, however, are too embarrassed to admit having purchased anything from a porn site and just grit their teeth and suffer the loss. The porn site operators count on this, so the individual amounts involved are usually quite small."
How serious is the problem? "Very serious," says Ashby. "In one case, the US Federal Trade Commission won a US$37,5 million verdict against a California-based adult Web site. The FTC proved that the defendants had repeatedly placed charges on consumers` credit and debit cards for X-rated Internet visits they had not made and services they had not ordered.
"In another case still before the courts, J K Publications (alias Webtel, Netfill, etc) is facing charges related to alleged fraudulent transactions involving some 900 000 credit cards which are estimated to have netted the company more than US$40 million."
Such cases reinforce VCS`s message of "safe shopping".
"Whenever you buy anything over the Net, ensure your credit card transaction is processed in a secure environment, such as offered by Virtual Card Services," says Ashby.
"As a payment gateway company, we use only our own secure computers and equipment. With a secure environment like this, cardholders are guaranteed that no one else - not even the merchant they buy from - will have access to their card information. This eliminates the possibility of this type of fraud."
More information about Virtual Card Service is available on the company`s web site, www.vcs.co.za
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