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January 22, 2020 07:30 pm

'How I Stopped a Credit Card Thief From Ripping Off 3,537 People -- and Saved Our Nonprofit in the Process'

Quincy Larson, founder of freeCodeCamp, a non-profit organization that runs an open-source community for learning to code, writes in a blog post: I tucked my son under my arm and jogged to my desk. I'd been up until 2 a.m. finishing the announcement for our new #AWSCertified Challenge. And so far, the launch was going well. Our new Twitter bot was tweeting, and our Discord chatroom was abuzz with ambitious developers eager to earn their AWS certifications. I was getting ready to meet with my team when I noticed two strange emails -- both of which arrived within minutes of one another. "Your a fraud" read one of the emails in typo-riddled English. "That's exactly what I'm thinking since I see a charge on my financial institution from you and since I've never heard of you. Yes you need to resolve this." The other email was... well, let's just say it was also an angry letter and let's leave it at that. freeCodeCamp is a donor-supported nonprofit, and we have thousands of people around the world who donate to us each month. Once in a while, there are misunderstandings -- usually when one family member donates without telling the other. But this felt different. So I tabbed over to Stripe, the credit card processing service our nonprofit uses for donations. On a typical day, we'd have 20 or 30 new donors. But here's what I saw instead: Stripe's dashboard showing 11,000 new customers and $60,000 in revenue for a single 24 hour period. It took me a moment to process what was happening. Our nonprofit -- which operates on an annual budget of less than $400,000 -- had just received more than $60,000 in 24 hours - and from thousands of donors. And my heart began to sink. There was no way those were real donations. We've had spikes in donations from articles in major newspapers. Heck -- I've even been interviewed on Good Morning America. But none of those spikes caused such a surge in donations. No. There was only one thing that could cause a surge in donations like this. Fraud. Extensive, programmatic credit card fraud. I'd heard about this technique before. It's called "card testing." Here's how it works: 1. A fraudster finds a website with a relatively simple credit card form. 2. Then they run scripts to test thousands of stolen credit card numbers in rapid succession. 3. That way they can see which cards are still valid and which ones have been cancelled. Then they turn around and sell those valid card numbers on the dark web. In this case, I'd detected the fraud much faster than a lot of other websites would have. So I had a window.

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