• U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch is expected to announce a crackdown on a global mail-fraud scheme that allegedly stole millions of dollars from elderly victims, CNNMoney reported. At the center of the investigation is an Canadian processor named PacNet Services Ltd. that reportedly deposited many of the victims’ checks. …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews The PCI Security Standards Council is now a decade old, and as it concludes its annual North America community meeting in Las Vegas Thursday it faces a payments-security landscape vastly changed from the one it confronted 10 years ago, with mobile payments, tokenization, and so-called fin-tech startups …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Companies that have been planning for months for the arrival Friday of same-day automated clearing house payments are getting ready to pounce, and one of the first opportunities lies in platform payouts. Des Moines, Iowa-based Dwolla Inc., for example, on Wednesday is announcing a new feature …

• The total value of contactless transactions worldwide will reach nearly $500 billion next year, up fully 56% from an estimated $321 billion in 2016, according to Juniper Research. • Samsung Electronics America Inc. said more than 500,000 replacement Galaxy Note7 phablets have arrived in the U.S. and will be available …

By Kevin Woodward @DTPaymentNews Almost a year after the U.S. payment card industry adopted EMV chip cards for point-of-sale transactions, approximately 44% of U.S. merchants that accept credit and debit cards have EMV POS terminals. That assessment, in The Strawhecker Group’s latest EMV survey released Tuesday, is less than an …

• The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC selected IBM Corp.’s Power8 system for its real-time payments service, expected to go live next year. The IBM system will run software from VocaLink Holdings Ltd., which TCH selected last year as a vendor for its project. VocaLink is being acquired by MasterCard …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Visa Inc. plans to phase out static passwords used with its Verified by Visa e-commerce fraud-control service beginning in April 2018. Visa’s announcement precedes even more changes coming to Verified by Visa’s underlying technology called Three-Domain Secure, or 3-Secure. EMVCo, the chip card standards body owned by …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews Acquirers and processors have until Oct. 14 to prepare their systems for a new range of bank-identification numbers MasterCard Inc. intends to add to its inventory for issuers. Announced in 2014, the move is an attempt to stymie a possible exhaustion of BINs. These numbers are the …

• Processor Fiserv Inc. said a new scoring model for its Payment Fraud Manager service designed specifically for automated clearing house transactions detected more than 90% of fraud while reviewing only 2% of the transactions in model validation tests. • Payment gateway Network Merchants LLC announced its SwIPe EMV chip …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews With more than 3 million renters enrolled in an online rent-payment service, Entrata Inc.’s desire to optimize its payment-card acceptance costs is paramount. That’s why Lehi, Utah-based Entrata is working with Visa Inc. on an improved payment and authorization program for the multifamily-housing industry. Announced Thursday, the …