Credits and loans

• Theft. The simplest form of fraud involves simply stealing someone’s card, impersonating the cardholder and faking his or her signature to make a purchase.

• Interception. Some fraud is carried out by interception of credit cards sent through the post to customers. This may involve an inside agent, a postal worker, for example, or may involve theft from a post box. The latter is most common in apartment blocks with communal post boxes.

Most banks have automated consumer credit scoring systems. These rely on the use of statistical data to determine likely risk of default. Non- quantitative factors that will be taken into amount include location, type of residence (house or apartment), rented or owned, children, and highest education qualification. An unmarried actor living in a rented apartment who dropped out of school may well be deemed a higher credit risk than a married lawyer with two children living in a townhouse she owns. This is likely to be the case even if the actor earns significantly more than the lawyer.
In the US there is a body of legislation intended to protect consumers from discrimination by prohibiting banks from making credit decisions on a number of grounds including race, gender and location. This is the exception rather than the rule. In most countries banks make such decisions with few legislative constraints.