Net credit card scam uncovered

Credit card scammers managed to verify the details on 60,000 credit cards over the internet before being spotted.

The scam involved 100,000 bogus internet transactions, of which more than 60,000 received authorisation codes.

The codes verified the validity of those account numbers, opening the door for more widespread theft. But the scam was detected at the eleventh .

Investigators think the fraud used a computer program to spit out randomly generated account numbers in search of authorisation codes to verify their existence.

But credit card processors said the breach probably would not have happened if the perpetrators had not been able to crack the affected merchants' passwords.