A dozen individuals have been arrested in the United Kingdom for laundering money through iTunes.
The twelve individuals’ plan was pretty simple, all things considered. Using stolen credit card numbers, they purchased tracks that they themselves had uploaded to Apple’s digital music delivery service. All things considered, they laundered over $300,000 worth of purchases in just four months.
For the record, this isn’t a security vulnerability with iTunes. Transacting digital goods is actually a common way to get money off of a stolen credit card number: I myself had $1500 stolen from me a few years back when someone got a hold of my credit card number and simply lost game after game of online poker against another account that he controlled.
The same thing pretty much went on here, and Apple wasn’t the only company to get hit: Amazon’s MP3 service was also used by the criminals in question.
Should this worry you? Probably not: in most cases of credit card fraud, credit card companies are quick to side with the card holder. In my case, all I had to do was assure Mastercard that neither I nor my girlfriend were secret gambling addicts. If you ever do see a suspicious iTunes charge come through on your credit card statement, give your bank — not Apple — a call, and they will very quickly set things right.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
