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Going on the offense for the second time in less than a month, Visa Inc. on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. seeking to prevent the world’s largest retailer from suing Visa over interchange. Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart is mulling a legal challenge to the bank card networks on …
Read More »Incidents of Fraud Following a Data Breach Nearly Double in Two Years, Study Finds
Just because a consumer’s financial information is compromised in a data breach does not mean the consumer will become a fraud victim. But the linkage between breaches and fraud is becoming much stronger, according to new data from Javelin Strategy & Research. Javelin recently reviewed data from its annual …
Read More »The FTC’s Breach Lawsuit Against Wyndham Becomes a Cybersecurity Flashpoint
A formerly obscure lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission against Wyndham Worldwide Corp. and three subsidiaries in the wake of three data breaches at the hotel chain has become the flashpoint of a growing debate about the lack of a federal law governing data security on the Internet and …
Read More »Visa, MasterCard File Suit As Credit Card Settlement Spawns More Litigation
World War I was supposed to be the war that ended all wars. It didn’t, of course. And the settlement announced last July that was supposed to end lawsuits over bank card interchange and related network rules not only is failing to end litigation between merchants and the card …
Read More »As a Key Deadline Nears, Credit Card Interchange Settlement Inspires a Raft of Rhetoric
The rhetoric spewing from partisans on both sides of the massive credit card interchange-litigation settlement is heating up as a major deadline in the 8-year-old case approaches. May 28 is the last day the court overseeing the case will let merchants opt out of their share of monetary damages …
Read More »Organized Crime, Espionage, And ‘Social’ Tactics Drive Recent Data Breaches
Financially motivated cybercrime accounted for 75% of data breaches in 2012, with state-affiliated espionage campaigns aimed at stealing intellectual property ranking second at 20%, according to the Verizon 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report released on Tuesday. In 2012, breaches affecting financial organizations accounted for 37% of the total, followed …
Read More »Judge Tells Retailer Groups To Settle Their Online Feud Arising From Interchange Settlement
In one of the stranger twists arising from the controversial settlement to credit card interchange litigation, the federal judge overseeing the massive case on Thursday gave lawyers for two feuding merchant groups a week to propose changes to a Web site that urges merchants to opt out of the …
Read More »Credit Cards, Prepaid Cards and Smart Phones Emerge as the Stars of POS Payments Growth
Aided by an improving economy, credit cards staged a comeback in 2012, edging out debit cards as the key payment option at the retail point of sale, according to a new report from Javelin Strategy & Research. While debit cards held the greatest share of total dollar volume at …
Read More »New Data Show Consumers Once Again Are Willing To Pull Out Their Credit Cards
Credit cards began staging a somewhat wobbly post-recession recovery in 2010 and 2011. But new figures from First Data Corp. and Visa Inc. indicate credit card charge volume is back to just about full health. In a mid-March investor presentation, Visa reported that U.S. credit card payment volume increased 11% …
Read More »With the Garden State’s Greenlight, Online Gambling’s Odds Look Better for Acquirers
Now that New Jersey has become the third state to legalize online gambling, the market for the first time in years has begun to offer possibilities to acquirers as a promising new source of transaction volume. But questions remain about how and how soon the new state laws will be …
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