When criminals steal or purchase stolen credit or debit card information, their objective is to use the information to obtain cash or to purchase goods that are quickly and easily re-sold for cash. There are a variety of ways in which this can occur; including, but not limited to:

• They can use the information themselves to make fraudulent online purchases, quickly maxing out the available credit or depleting the account balance.
• They can create cloned (duplicate) physical cards which can be used for online, point-of-sale, and ATM transactions 
• Rather than use the information themselves, they sell the information (singly or in bulk) to other criminals who then use it

When the stolen payment card information is used at a business to purchase goods or services, the target business may incur compounded losses through chargeback fees, loss of income from reversal of the fraudulent purchase, and loss of the goods or services delivered.

In other cases, more sophisticated and enterprising criminals may impersonate a business, using the business' information and identifiers, to establish credit card processing accounts through which they are able to make and process fraudulent transactions using the stolen credit/debit card information - for themselves and even as a service for other criminals. Depending upon the severity of the impersonation, the unsuspecting business may suddenly find its own merchant account terminated as a result, or suddenly receive a deluge of telephone calls from victims demanding to know why the company made fraudulent charges to their credit or debit card.

With the economic downturn, criminals are devising new schemes and tactics to take advantage of business reporting processes and weak protections for businesses. One such new fraud trend involves fraudulent wage reporting to commit tax fraud. There has been a great deal of focus on the high number of incidents of consumer tax refund fraud, in which thieves file fraudulent tax returns and obtain the personal tax refunds of their victims. But there is another side to the story that has been largely ignored by the media - and businesses are the victims.

Using a business' EIN (employer identification number), thieves can create bogus W-2s which are used to report fictitious income to the Internal Revenue Service, thus allowing criminals and their accomplices to pose as employees in order to file fraudulent federal income tax returns and receive tax refunds. The false W-2 forms not only report fictitious income, but also fictitious tax withholding which is the basis for the fraudulent refund claim. When this happens, the amounts paid by the employer for its legitimate employees don't match what the IRS and state tax agencies calculate should have been paid due to the additional bogus reporting, leaving a deficiency seemingly owed by the unsuspecting business. In some cases, the deficiency can be tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Because wage reporting is usually taken at face value by the IRS and state tax agencies as it is received, the target business is completely unaware of the fraud until it is notified of a deficiency in the employment taxes the business has paid, and receives a demand for payment. Suddenly, the business owner now faces a prolonged and difficult challenge of an investigation by state and federal tax agencies and must attempt to prove to these agencies that a fraud has occured.

Consumers have been conditioned to provide confidential personal and financial information to businesses when making a purchase or applying for credit. Even more so in the case of employment - which may require divulging Social Security number and date of birth, banking information, or authorizing a credit and/or background check.

Thieves have found that in difficult economic times, with rampant layoffs and high unemployment, impersonating a business and offering bogus job opportunities can be an effective way to con unsuspecting applicants into willingly providing large amounts of personal information in the hopes of obtaining a new job at the impersonated business.