Also, I would like to tell that fraud CC's aren't really harming the single person who owns the CC, but rather the CC company as most of them give you back your stolen money. Friend of mine just got stolen 2400€ via his CC and he got it all back pretty easy (sic!)
Greets, M
Lol where does the CC company get the money to reimburse you with? They get it from the fees that their customers pay. In other words, the customers pay for the fraud and as such experience harm.
Knowing someone who works for a prominent data forensics firm, I am frequently told this: If the CC companies can figure out how the card numbers got stolen (e.g. in a data breach or something), they will brazenly recoup their losses by tapping the credit card income of the merchant they consider responsible for the breach, until the losses are covered. And they are fairly good at figuring out who to blame, simply by using algorithms that look for common points of purchase among cards that have been stolen. They can usually nail it right down to the specific gas pump, or the specific web site, or the specific terminal that got hacked. A five, six, or seven figure loss is very unwelcome to any small business, and the credit card companies couldn't care less if the business gets wiped out in the process.
They use that so-called "PCI DSS Compliance Questionnaire" to seal the deal. Every merchant must certify themselves as PCI Compliant to avoid paying hefty fees, and that self-certification pretty much buries them in the event of a breach. The rationale goes like this: "You certified that you do XYZ to protect CC#'s, clearly you did not, so all losses from this breach are your fault."
Someone suggested that CC theft is somehow OK because you're stealing from a bank, not an individual. I would submit that stealing from a bank is still stealing and isn't somehow more justified just because they are a bank. It is one thing to take a position that the war on drugs is a victimless non-crime, an ineffective misallocation of resources, an intrusion upon the freedom of adults. It's yet another to start up a free-for-all that enables things like fraud and theft - things that are unmistakably criminal and detrimental to society - or makes things like weapons available to violent criminals and the mentally ill.