E-Commerce

Pre-holiday spending volume on Visa cards continued to build in the week through Sunday, with overall transactions increasing 18.8%, to 405.6 million ($22.7 billion in dollar volume), over the same week a year ago. Activity on the Internet and in fast-food chains, two closely watched emerging spending categories, increased 22.5% …

Fraudsters sent out fewer phishing e-mail campaigns in September, but they operated from more Web sites, launched several opportunistic campaigns?including ones designed to steal donations intended for Hurricane Katrina victims?and became even more inventive in their use of keyloggers and other malware. The number of unique phishing reports received by …

With identify fraud posing a serious challenge to online bankers and merchants, technology vendors are starting to respond with hardware- and software-based solutions offering so-called strong authentication, which adds a second factor of identity to the standard user-name/password pair. Now Corillian Corp. has launched a product it says is the …

EBay Inc.'s PayPal payment service continued its diversification effort beyond the eBay online auction community this week by adding computer giant Dell Inc. to its growing fold of mainstream merchants. PayPal also unveiled an online gift-certificate program for merchants that expands upon an eBay gift-certificate plan launched two years ago. …

CheckFree Corp. is leveraging its access to millions of electronic bill-payment transactions to offer a new anti-fraud tool that it says can stop fraud losses before they happen in consumer payment channels in and outside of electronic bill pay. The Norcross, Ga.-based processor, which serves about 1,700 financial institutions and …

Total losses from e-commerce fraud will hit $2.8 billion in 2005, up from $2.6 billion last year, with large and mid-sized merchants getting hit the hardest after several years of success in controlling the problem, according to a study released today. Although the overall rate of fraud loss will dip …

Quick-service outlets and e-commerce, both emerging channels for electronic transactions, grew at double-digit rates in activity on Visa USA credit and debit cards in the week ending Nov. 6, according to a report the card association released today. In the run-up to the critical holiday spending season, fast-food transactions jumped …

A new guidance from federal banking regulators calling traditional user names and passwords “inadequate” for online banking could lead to a major push for strong authentication next year. The guidance, released last month by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, recommends what it calls multi-factor authentication, or identification systems involving …

PayPal Inc. may be trying to process more transactions for e-commerce sites independent of its parent company, giant online auctioneer eBay Inc., but its latest quarterly figures indicate it still depends on eBay's auction activity for 69% of its transaction volume, a ratio that has remained virtually unchanged for months. …

PayPal Inc. will use the transaction gateway it is buying from VeriSign Inc. for $370 million to thrust itself even more deeply into the business of acquiring transactions for small off-eBay Internet merchants, a senior executive for the transaction-processing unit of eBay Inc. tells Digital Transactions News. PayPal, which this …