The Economics of Card Testing
Testing is the one point in the card fraud lifecycle where intent is already confirmed but the loss has not happened yet. This report is about operating there.
What this report covers:
- Why the testing stage is the intervention window
"Detection at the testing stage is early enough to prevent monetization, yet late enough to avoid the noise and false positives associated with static exposure data."
- The merchants you cannot see
Criminals rarely test at well-defended sites. They test at small stores, donation platforms and trial signups — often at merchants that never send an issuer authorization at all, which is why the activity is invisible to conventional fraud models.
- Where the lifecycle can still be changed
A walk through the card fraud lifecycle from breach to cash-out, and why most fraud tooling operates at the end of it while the decisive moment sits at the start.
- The observed numbers
17M+ compromised cards observed during testing, 200K+ net new cards added weekly, and a 25-day average lead time on compromised card detection in live customer data.
- The criminal vocabulary
Carding, dumps, white plastic, BIN attacks and cashing out — what each term actually describes, and where each sits in the sequence.