Lost amid the media firestorm these past few weeks about fraudsters turning to Apple Pay is this stark and rather unsettling reality: Apple Pay makes it possible for cyber thieves to buy high-priced merchandise from brick-and-mortar stores using stolen credit and debit card numbers that were heretofore only useful for online fraud.

To understand what’s going on here, a quick primer on card fraud is probably in order. If you’re a fraudster and you wish to walk into a Best Buy store and walk out with a big screen TV or xBox console on someone else’s dime, you’re going to buy “dumps,” which are data stolen straight off the magnetic stripe on the backs of cards.

Typically, dumps are stolen via malware planted on point-of-sale devices, as in the breaches at brick-and-mortar stores like Target, Home Depot and countless others over the past year. Dumps buyers encode the data onto new plastic, which they then use “in-store” at retailers and walk out with armloads full of high-priced goods that can be easily resold for cash. The average price of a single dump is between $10-$30, but the payoff in stolen merchandise per card is often many times that amount.

When fraudsters want to order something online using stolen credit cards, they go buy what the crooks call “CVVs” — i.e., card data stolen from hacked online stores. CVV stands for “card verification code,” and refers to the three-digit code on the back of cards that’s required for most online transactions. Fraudsters buying CVVs get the credit card number, the expiration date, the card verification code, as well as the cardholder’s name, address and phone number. Because they’re less versatile than dumps, CVVs cost quite a bit less — typically around $1-$5 per stolen account.

So in summary, dumps are stolen from main-street merchants, and are sought after by crooks mainly for use at main street merchants. CVVs, on the other hand, are stolen from online stores, and are useful only for fraud against online stores.

Enter Apple Pay, which potentially erases that limitation of CVVs because it allows users to sign up online for an in-store payment method using little more than a hacked iTunes account and CVVs. That’s because most banks that are enabling Apple Pay for their customers do little, if anything, to require that customers prove they have the physical card in their possession.

Avivah Litan, a fraud analyst with Gartner Inc. explained a blog post published earlier this month that Apple provides banks with a fair amount of data to aid banks in their efforts at “identity proofing” the customer, such as device name, its current geographic location, and whether or not the customer has a long history of transactions with iTunes.

All useful data points, of course, unless the iTunes account that all of this information is based on is hijacked by fraudsters. And as we know from previous stories on this blog, there is a robust trade in the cybercrime underground for hijacked iTunes accounts, which retail for about $8 per account.

Litan’s column continues:

Interestingly, neither Apple nor the banks get any useful identity information out of the mobile carriers – at least that I know or heard of. And mobile carrier data could be particularly helpful with identity proofing. For example the banks could compare the mobile service’s billing address with the card account holder’s billing address. For years, we have been briefed by vendors offering a plethora of innovative and strong user authentication solutions for mobile payments and commerce. And for years, we have been asking the vendors touting them how they know their mobile app is being provisioned to a legitimate user rather than a fraudster. That always appeared to me to be the weakest link in mobile commerce –making sure you provide the app to the right person instead of a crook. Identity proofing in a non-face-to-face environment is anything but easy but there are some decent solutions around that can be stitched together to significantly narrow down the population of fraudulent transactions and identities. The key is reducing reliance on static data – much of which is PII data that has been compromised by the crooks – and increasing reliance on dynamic data, like reputation, behavior and relationships between non-PII data elements. This problem is only going to get worse as Samsung/LoopPay and the MCX/CurrentC (supported by Walmart, BestBuy and many other major retailers) release their mobile payment systems, without the customer data advantages Apple has in their relatively closed environment.

Sure, the banks could pressure Apple Pay to make their users take a picture of their credit cards with the iPhone and upload that data before signing up. That might work for a short while to deter fraud, at least until the people at underground document forgery sites like Scanlab see a new market for their services.

But in the end, most banks coming online with Apple Pay are still using customer call centers to validate new users, leveraging data that can be purchased very cheaply from underground identity theft sites. If any of you doubt how easy it is to buy personal data on just about anyone, check out the story I wrote in December 2014, wherein I was able to find the name, address, Social Security number, previous address and phone number on all current members of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee.

The irony here is that while Apple Pay has been touted as a more secure alternative to paying with a credit card, the way Apple and the banks have implemented it actually makes card fraud cheaper and easier for fraudsters.

Even more deliciously ironic, as noted in Cherian Abraham‘s insightful column at Droplabs, is how much of the fraud stemming from crooks signing up stolen credit cards with Apple Pay was tied to purchases of high-dollar Apple products at Apple’s own brick-and-mortar stores! That banks end up eating the fraud costs from this activity is just the cherry on top.

Abraham said the banks are in this mess because they didn’t demand more transparency and traceability from Apple before rushing to sign customers up (or “provision” them, in banker-speak) for Apple Pay.

“One of the biggest gripes I have heard from issuers is the lack of transparency from Apple (what did they expect?) and the makeshift reporting provided to issuers that is proving to be woefully inadequate,” Abaraham wrote. “As long as issuers fall back on measures easily circumvented by freely available PII – this problem will continue to leech trust and large sums of cash. And alongside of the latter, there is much blame to go around as well.”

Both Abraham and Gartner’s Litan say banks need to take a step back and take the time to develop more robust, thoughtful and scalable solutions to identity proofing customers, particularly as other mobile providers begin rolling out their mobile payment systems without the customer data advantages that Apple has in their relatively closed environment.

“The vendors in the mobile user authentication space have consistently answered that they are leaving account provisioning policies to the banks or other consumer service providers provisioning the apps,” Litan wrote. “Well maybe it’s time for them to reconsider and start helping their client banks and service providers by supporting identity proofing solutions built into their apps. Whoever does this well is surely going to win lots of customer support… and revenue.”

Tags: Apple Pay, avivah litan, Cherian Abraham, CVVs, Droplabs, dumps, Gartner Inc., identity proofing, Scanlab