Fraud & Security

The Federal Reserve announced Thursday it is shutting down its Secure Payments Task Force this month. The Fed invited its more than 200 members, made up of payments executives from across the financial-services industry, to work with its FedPayments Improvement Community. Members may also participate in “new collaborative industry work …

Equifax Inc. said it expects costs from its massive 2017 data breach to hit $275 million this year, offset by $75 million in insurance proceeds, Reuters reported. The credit-reporting agency also disclosed that another 2.4 million people were affected by the cyber attack in addition to the more than 145 …

At a time when the payment card industry continues to struggle with the consequences of data breaches, the last thing acquirers and issuers need is a slowdown in merchant compliance with critical data-security rules. Yet that is what’s going on, warn the Merchant Acquirers Committee and ControlScan Inc. in survey …

Discover Financial Services cardholders will be able to make point-of-sale contactless purchases with wearables and Internet of Things devices that use FitPay Inc.’s FitPay Payment Platform under an agreement announced Monday by the two companies. The new service will provision payment credentials using the Discover Digital Exchange, Riverwoods, Ill.-based Discover’s …

Some 27% of executives with responsibility for their organization’s mobile devices said their firm had experienced a security incident in the past year involving the loss of data or system downtime in which mobile devices played a key role, according to new findings from Verizon Communications Inc. In addition, 32% …

Some 2.7 million merchant locations, or 59% of U.S. storefronts, were accepting EMV chip cards as of December, according to the latest update from Visa Inc., issued Friday. That’s up from 392,000 locations in September 2015, just before the major card networks began enforcing a mandate for chip card acceptance. …

Visa Inc. launched Token Management Service, a service it says will make it easier for users to manage tokenized payment card data from multiple sources and across multiple channels, the card network announced Thursday. Designed to complement the Visa Token Service, the new program provides a way for merchants to use …

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 …