-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- The New York Times Letters Thursday, September 21, 1995 Fraud Can Flourish Without the Internet To the Editor: Your Sept. 19 front-page article on the discovery by two University of California graduate students of a flaw in Netscape, the software used for purchases over the Internet's World Wide Web, raises a number of obvious questions. First, who needs high tech to per- petrate fraud? Any unscrupulous commercial employee could use or sell your credit card number without employing technology. Every time you hand your card to a waiter in a restaurant, it disap- pears for several minutes. The de- partment store clerks and gas sta- tion attendants you deal with also have access to your card number. How secure is that? Ever give your credit card num- ber over the phone to make a purchase from a mail-order house? Or to secure a reservation at a hotel? Who's to say that the em- ployees you're speaking with are honest? Or that your phone is no tapped? Or theirs? I shop on the Internet; I may get ripped off. What's my liability? Fifty bucks -- sames as the other scenarios I've described. That's in my credit agreement with the card issuer. So why all the hoopla? Is credit card fraud significantly more preva- lent on the Internet than in other modes of purchasing? Or is the banking industry whip- ping up hysteria among purchasers to curb fraud losses? Was the work of those graduate students funded by someone -- directly or indirect- ly? If so, by whom? A banking consortium? A high-tech company working on some patentable security scheme? ROBERT HERRIG Peekskill, N.Y., Sept. 19, 1995 The writer is a systems consultant. DEADBEAT <na5877@anon.penet.fi> for the I.L.F. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQBFAgUBMGFgp/FZTpBW/B35AQFiuAF/c7DUidkXEe1oBdRpsmfzkXzii44qFPQ3 YQui2lORNA8RUaWiB25poSLFNdiBMJnX =duqf -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To find out more about the anon service, send mail to help@anon.penet.fi. If you reply to this message, your message WILL be *automatically* anonymized and you are allocated an anon id. Read the help file to prevent this. Please report any problems, inappropriate use etc. to admin@anon.penet.fi.