You Want to Be

raud is the bane of the financial industry's existence. Financial institutions are constantly battling forgery , impersonation, and outright theft, and the advent of computers and the Internet, while increasing capability and efficiency, has exacerbated the problem. Visa has stepped in and started an information security program that seeks to revolutionize the industry. Today, average people are continually fooled into providing confidential and private information by phishers who in turn steal their money and identities. Companies that process financial transactions are everywhere and are collecting vast amounts of your information. Many of these organizations are the target of crime syndicates and hackers seeking to obtain personal information to commit fraud. Given the growing number of transactions , along with the number of merchants and providers processing credit card information , the implications of insecurity have the potential to move well beyond what we are seeing today. One could argue that if the risk of using one's credit card continues to increase, it could adversely affect the spending practices of the public. and the United Arab Emirates, where credit card transactions are increasing in number and for discretionary spending. Every country, established or emerging, wants to move away from cash transactions. Cash is expensive to produce and refresh, prone to counterfeit, and offers the means to launder illicit activities. In an attempt to counter credit card fraud, some organizations , such as American Express, implemented integrated circuits (IC) into the credit cards. They incorporated programma-ble logic in an effort to instill integrity in the transaction. At one point, American Express was offering USB card readers for online transactions. Unfortunately, average consumers were disinterested because they could not fully appreciate the risk from which they were being protected. Other organizations, more so in the United Kingdom , Germany, Switzerland, and France, could take advantage of smart-card technology in point of sale (POS) systems, arguably because of their pragmatic approach to security and a manageable geography. However, they too suffer from adoption, and aside from the IC, the credit card has changed very little in the last several decades. An intriguing initiative (once again, started by American Express) was the provi-sioning of temporary virtual credit cards; specifically, virtual numbers. The process was simple: a credit card holder would access a Web site, authenticated and presumably secure, and acquire a virtual number that could be used on the Internet. The