TY - GEN
T1 - Bullet-proof payment processors
AU - Tian, Hongwei
AU - Gaffigan, Stephen M.
AU - Sean West, D.
AU - McCoy, Damon
N1 - Funding Information:
ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work was funded in part by the National Science Foundation through CNS-1619620 and CNS-1717062 and by gifts from Comcast and Google. We thank Melissa McCoy for her editing assistance, the anonymous reviewers for their useful feedback, and the many anonymous people that assisted by placing purchases.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 IEEE.
PY - 2018/6/8
Y1 - 2018/6/8
N2 - Abusively advertised online counterfeit luxury goods sales are a complex operation that requires accessible and reliable payment processing to transfer money from customer to merchant. Payment interventions have become one of many methods to combat this activity. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of an intervention in the face of bullet-proof payment processors and possibly lessening fines levied by Visa Asia against banks found underwriting accounts for merchants violating intellectual property. Our study includes measurements from 424 successful test counterfeit luxury goods purchases over two years and direct interactions with payment processors associated with our purchases. We find that our long-running payment intervention results in a test purchaser detection and evasion arms-race with the bullet-proof processors. We also find that only one bank, the Bank of China, continues on boarding a majority of counterfeit luxury goods merchants for the entire two year period.
AB - Abusively advertised online counterfeit luxury goods sales are a complex operation that requires accessible and reliable payment processing to transfer money from customer to merchant. Payment interventions have become one of many methods to combat this activity. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of an intervention in the face of bullet-proof payment processors and possibly lessening fines levied by Visa Asia against banks found underwriting accounts for merchants violating intellectual property. Our study includes measurements from 424 successful test counterfeit luxury goods purchases over two years and direct interactions with payment processors associated with our purchases. We find that our long-running payment intervention results in a test purchaser detection and evasion arms-race with the bullet-proof processors. We also find that only one bank, the Bank of China, continues on boarding a majority of counterfeit luxury goods merchants for the entire two year period.
KW - Economics
KW - Measurement
KW - Security
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85049311877&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85049311877&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ECRIME.2018.8376208
DO - 10.1109/ECRIME.2018.8376208
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85049311877
T3 - eCrime Researchers Summit, eCrime
SP - 1
EP - 11
BT - Proceedings of the 2018 APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research, eCrime 2018
PB - IEEE Computer Society
T2 - 2018 APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research, eCrime 2018
Y2 - 15 May 2018 through 17 May 2018
ER -