In one case, a University of Minnesota student allegedly stole frat-mates' credit cards and engaged chat hostess Tawnee from LiveCamNetwork.com and several others in private video sex chat.
In another case, several chat-studio performers were partnering with an unknown credit card thief who would then "wash" hundreds of dollars through certain websites by taking the ladies to pay-chat, turning stolen credit into hard cash through paycheques. More arrests are expected in the near future, though no further details are available.
Live video chat site LiveCamNetwork.com serves as the testing ground for the software and services 2much.net develops for its growing network of streaming video chat sites. AHMAD, the system responsible for catching the fraudster, was developed following a recent spate of false credit card submissions.
AHMAD, the Automated Human-Monitored Anti-fraud & Detection system, is programmed to flag transactions it detects as potentially fraudulent, while simultaneously allowing a human operator to review these and other transactions.
"Normally this kind of fraud would have gone undetected," said 2much president Mark Prince. "And would result in a chargeback once the cardholders noticed the charges on their statments a month later."
2much programmers used certain criteria to flag the transactions as suspect. "We automatically flag any transaction with a woman's first name, for example," said 2much media & communications manager Greg Jones. "In more than nine cases out of ten it's fraud."
Jones refrained from discussing other details. Women are statistically the least likely consumers of online adult material and so a purchase under a female name must be scrutinized by human eyes before a decision is made.
The human operator was factored in to add a dimension of intuition to AHMAD. "Certain behaviours are key indicators of fraud, and can't be programmed," said Jones. "We've broken them down and outlined them for our operator, but I won't talk about them for obvious reasons."
To tell the tale of how 2much worked together with their billing company and the Minnesota police to pinpoint and corner the fraud artist would be harmful to future prevention. "We're out to hinder, not help, the thieves out there," said Jones. "So let's just say it was a fruitful cooperative process and leave it at that."
Currently, the AHMAD system is only available to clients of the LiveCamNetwork chat system.
For more information, visit 2much.net.