What is sting operation?

Who would be interested in pursuing a sting operation against a credit card fraud ring?

• I ask because I'm in a good position to carry out such a sting. I get somewhat regular phone calls from one or more fraud rings - the calls have similar but not quite identical tactics each time. I typically hang up, but recently I fed them a fictitious card number, expiration date, zip code, and last-four-of-SSN, and they put me on hold for a few minute before asking me to repeat the information. So apparently they had attempted to validate the card information, presumably by attempting to authorize a charge. With a valid card number it should be relatively easy to look up the merchant account information associated with that initial validation attempt, and it seems there's a pretty good chance that would lead directly to the perpetrators. And ideally, that card number would be provided by a credit card processor, to be used only for this specific purpose. I don't want to try this with an actual card of my own. I did some searching online but wasn't able to find any promising information about what groups would be interested in this and able to do it.  Apparently this would be within the jurisdiction of the FBI and secret  service, and I imagine there might be fraud mitigation teams working  within the major card issuers, but I'm not sure where to start / who to contact. When my CC# was poached a couple years ago, local law enforcement didn't seem very interested in investigating.  However I'd like to think that there might be another law enforcement organization that specializes in this sort of thing.  Or perhaps there's a team at Visa or Mastercard whose mission includes finding perpetrators like these and bringing them to justice. If anyone has contact information for individuals or teams who would be interested in this sort of thing, I'd really appreciate some pointers. Thanks!

• Answer:

  As you suspected, this would most likely fall under the jurisdiction of the Secret Service (and possibly the FBI). I'm curious to know why it is that you regularly receive inquiries from fraud rings asking for credit card and SSN information. I'm not sure if you're willing to share more details in this forum, but it's rather curious that they see you as a potential "source". Be that as it may, you're welcome to contact me via direct message on Quora and I can get you connected with the appropriate folks at Visa. I can't promise what might come of it, but it sounds like it's worth having a conversation. Thanks in advance.