Who We're Watching: SellitSAFE
Last week, Glenbrook's Allen Weinberg attended the Electronic Transaction Association's annual meeting in Las Vegas and, among all of the usual convention floor exhibits, one new company struck his fancy: SellitSAFE. Read Allen's commentary on the company.
ETA Report from Allen Weinberg
At the ETA last week in Las Vegas, there was an ever expanding array of booths showing old and new products and services. From an industry observer's point of view and a veteran of a string of ETA's, there were the usual, mundane services such as zip zap machines, business forms, employee background checks, along side of the latest and greatest wired and wireless terminals and such.
Stuck far in the corner was one intriguing service that really caught my eye -- SellitSAFE (www.sellitsafe.com). The booth featured some PCs that were logged into some hacker "chat rooms" that was a marketplace for credit card numbers, home banking credentials, and other related information. Live MasterCard and Visa card numbers and related information was rolling down the LCD monitors at a snappy pace.
SellitSAFE logs all the numbers and creates a database that ecommerce merchants and other at-risk parties can use as a fraud prevention tool (what ecommerce merchant wouldn't like to know if an order was placed with a compromised account?). In fact, the company is adding 3,000 to 5,000 numbers PER DAY to the database.
Since it's pretty new to market and hasn't signed up a significant number of merchant customers, at this point in time, the company wasn't in a position to communicate any of the really key performance metrics, such as the number of merchant hits on its database (one good indicator of avoided losses).
By the way, one particularly disturbing fact was that according to the company, credit and debit card issuers have expressed no interest in SellitSAFE's data showing which of its accounts have already been compromised. SellitSAFE staff thinks one reason for this might be that it could take a number of months for the account to be used fraudulently, if it all, and they not feel that associated expense of closing and reissuing the card is worthwhile. Not too comforting from a consumers point of view.
At any rate, I remain intrigued by the company and its service and will be keeping my eye on them as they move forward!
[Editor's Note: Continue the dialog with Allen by sending him an email at: allen@glenbrook.com]
Add your comment... (note that all comments are reviewed before they're published)