What else is being done? The next step of our strategy is the education. It's something we have been associated with for a long time. We do a great deal of public outreach. But with 133 million customers it is fairly difficult to get to all of them and get the right message across to them. So that is the problem in that area. We do believe that part of the issue is the messages that have been delivered to consumers have not been specific enough. Essentially, we'd love to be able to say don't click on links in e-mails. But I don't think the industry's quite there yet. But we do think it is entirely valid to say be extremely careful about clicking a link in an e-mail and use judgment.
The next piece of our line of defense is the whole safe browser question. I seen some splash at RSA about Extended Verification SSL Certificates. Essentially, if you are using a modern browser such as IE7 or any other browser, if you come to paypal.com your address bar in the browser will glow green. Before you actually enter any data, make sure you are using a modern browser and do check to see if your URL bar is green. And if it is, it is now safe to do enter information.
What about the strong authentication initiative Paypal announced last year? This year we have actually launched it. As of now, we are enabling consumers to apply for a security key. It is simply a one-time password generator, a piece of hardware that allows a customer to associate with their PayPal account and have it as a sort of second factor of authentication. So they will still have their user ID and password, but now to log on they will enter that information and then they enter the one-time password. So if your credential got stolen, the bad guy would not be able to do anything with your account. It is just now running out in a public beta in the U.S., Australia and Germany. We want to see what or customers think about it. We are giving the tokens away for free to our [business accounts]. We are charging a nominal $5 fee for the others. We are not making any money on it, but we do need to cover our shipping and handling costs. We also believe it is important to show that these tokens have a value.
What percent of your resources and security efforts are focused on dealing with the phishing problem? There are two elements in my job. One of them is focused on ensuring that the company has all of the right internal controls so we can pass all the necessary audits. Then the other part of my job is to essentially help ensure that our customers are appropriately protected. It is essentially very hard to say exactly how much we are spending on this problem. I will say it is absolutely a top priority for the company and we are most certainly prioritizing it.
Besides tokens, what are some of the other measures for mitigating fraud? We already do quite a bit of fraud modeling -- some of which is behavioral and some of which is IP-based. We generally don't talk a lot about the details simply because it is proprietary and because the more we talk about it the more information we give to our adversaries. Suffice it to say we already have extensive security controls, as evidenced by the fact that our total fraud rate is significantly lower than the total fraud rate in the credit card industry. Our fraud rate is four-tenths of 1 percent. If you go look up average numbers in the credit card industry, it's a whole lot higher than that. That fact is a testimony to the effectiveness of our security controls.