New measures to help combat credit card fraud in Wirtualna Polska

From yesterday eCard will authorize payments made by Visa and Europay/ Mastercard in the on-line store of Wirtualna Polska. eCard, which monitors payments by credit cards for 230 Polish internet stores detected a several dozen cases of fraud in 2001. eCard has created a system that protects internet transactions made by credit cards through using coded data tr ansmissions. In the event of a suspicious transaction, the company contacts the card issuer to check if their clients have really made a payment. According to Malgorzata Ciszecka, operations director of eCard, last year her company submitted information about a dozen suspicious transactions to the police, six of which ended in indictments, and one with a sentence. According to Ciszecka there are 12 times more fraudulent transaction on the Internet than with physical payments. Fraud accounts for 0.02% of the number of all transactions authorized by them and 0.04% of their value. (Rzec zpospolita, p. B5) P.W.