Efforts to prevent credit card fraud have focused historically on the card itself. This strategy ("strategy x") is the credit card industry's traditional response to its problem with fraud. By convention, the banks and credit lenders have chosen to center their crime-control efforts on the undermining of criminal initiatives designed to compromise the integrity of credit cards by counterfeiting, altering, or stealing. In practice, strategy x attempts to prevent credit fraud by embracing technologies that enhance the perception of the credit card's invulnerability while using a private security apparatus to investigate its failures. An alternative fraud prevention approach ("strategy y") has been used since August 1993 at Tops Appliance City, Inc., a major East Coast retailer of consumer electronics and appliances. Called Cardwatch, the strategy consists of two personal computer processing units connected by a local area network cable. One CPU is installed at a capture station, and the other at a verification station. The capture station is located within each store's finance department to process new proprietary credit card applicants, and the verification station is located at each store's electronic purchase pick-up counter to identify customers as they arrive to receive merchandise. First-time credit applicants are photographed at the capture station while they wait for credit approval. Once archived, the account holder's file is viewable on every CPU monitor. Compared to strategy x, strategy y avoids challenging criminals to the sort of technological competition that now exists, and it closes the window of opportunity on several types of credit fraud that exploit account holder anonymity: nonreceipt, the theft of cards sent through the mail; lost or stolen, the theft of cards by pick-pocketing, robbery, burglary, or opportunity; counterfeit, the embossing of real credit card numbers onto illegally manufactured cards; and magstripe, the encoding of a legitimate card's data onto the magnetic stripe of an illegitimate one. The evident success of strategy seems directly attributable to its ability to control the identification element of the credit transaction. 1 table and 3 references