MasterCard says it has shut down nearly 1400 phishing sites and another 750 Web sites that purported to illegally sell credit card information since launching its anti-fraud programme less than a year ago.
The company says the anti-fraud initiative, which was launched in June last year, has also led to the discovery and protection of more than 35,000 MasterCard account numbers that were "in jeopardy of being compromised".
Information gathered from its anti-fraud campaign has also led to the arrests of 27 computer and credit card fraudsters by the US Secret Service.
MasterCard has been using Web crawling technology from NameProtect to detect online scams in real-time. The Internet detection technology continuously monitors domain names, Web pages, online discussions, spam e-mail, and other online formats to identify online trading rings and spoof phishing sites.
As a result of the success of the campaign, NameProtect says it will begin offering an expanded version of its NameProtection technology to MasterCard customer financial institutions.