Fraud & Security

Some 124 new data breaches have become known this year as of Feb. 16, the Identity Theft Resource Center reports. And the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors issued a study last week pegging the cost of malicious cyber activity to the economy in 2016 at $57 billion on the …

Stolen identity information obtained by several Russian defendants named in Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller’s indictment, released last week, was used to create fraudulent PayPal Holdings Inc. accounts. The defendants were named in connection with alleged activities surrounding the 2016 presidential election. The indictment provides details about an alleged conspiracy …

BuyerDocs has been formed to secure wires for down payments made by home buyers from hacking, phishing, imposters, and spoofing. Wire fraud plundered approximately $1 billion from the real-estate industry in 2017, the company says. The Smart Payment Association and payment card manufacturer CPI Card Group Inc. announced that CPI …

A new point-of-sale software malware strain wants its victims to think it is a nondescript bit of code that computers and networks commonly use when surfing the Internet. Uncovered by investigators at Austin, Texas-based Forcepoint, a data-security services provider, the malware, dubbed “UDPos” by Forcepoint, attempts to conceal itself in …

The Accredited Standards Committee X9 Inc. and the PCI Security Standards Council announced they will jointly develop a unified PIN-security standard. Currently each organization maintains a separate standard for PIN use, which could result in an entity being subject to one or both of the existing standards. The joint effort …

While the U.S. Department of Justice’s Operation Choke Point initiative ended last year, over-zealous efforts by other federal agencies threaten law-abiding payments companies in the same way Choke Point did, the chief executive of the Electronic Transactions Association warned Congress on Thursday. Testifying before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on …

Mobile-authentication technology provider Payfone Inc. has raised another $23 million in a new funding round that included retail card payment services provider Synchrony Financial. The exact investment from Synchrony Ventures, Synchrony Financial’s venture-capital arm, wasn’t disclosed in Tuesday’s announcement. An undisclosed institutional investor led the funding round. In addition to …

A July 1 PCI Security Standards Council deadline is prompting payments providers to act well before then, with many establishing their own compliance deadlines in February. What has provoked this eagerness? It could be that noncompliance with the PCI mandate could halt merchant transactions that rely on the Internet. The …

Criminals target signature-based debit cards for fraud attempts far more than any other payment method, according to new findings from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. The Minneapolis Fed’s survey last summer, which garnered responses from 283 banks and credit unions across the country, found that more than 90% of …

Thanks to the seemingly unending epidemic of data breaches—capped by the huge breach last summer at credit-reporting titan Equifax Inc.—consumers are becoming both more aware and more cynical about the problem, according to research released Tuesday by Javelin Strategy & Research. In the wake of the Equifax case, in which …