Originally Posted by AdultEUhost

There are several ways to work with stolen credit cards, this is well organised actually. You have people who skim and sell the credit card details but you also have people who specialize in carding (taking money of stolen credit cards). They normally don't go to ATM's etc as that is too much work and too risky. What they do is they work with cardable sites (online shops where security is low and where they can use stolen credit cards). They order goods from several shops (goods which are valuable, can be sold quickly on the black market like game consoles etc etc) and have those delivered to several drop locations. For example they break into an empty building and make it appear as a normal home or business, they have tons of packages delivered there in only a few days after which they disappear. The goods are sold on the black market then which makes it almost impossible to trace.

When people find out that their credit card was used for fraud they call the bank which will block their card. Either the bank will take the loss or they file charge backs where the problem and loss will be pushed to the merchant (shop). Banks normally take to the loss and hardly communicate these things as they still want everybody to believe that their money is safe with the bank. These days it is becoming a real problem as it happening more and more and the underground market is very professional these days. Either way the customer will always pay for the damage by higher bank fees or higher retail fees as shops calculate these risks into their pricing nowadays.