Fraud & Security

As cryptocurrency values increase and draw more attention, individuals with ill intent are looking to hijack smart phones and desktop computers to mine digital currencies. Opera Software AS, a Norway-based browser developer, wants to prevent that for users of its technology. Opera introduced an anti-mining feature to its mobile browser …

About a year later than it intended, Amazon.com Inc. on Monday opened to the public an 1,800-square-foot convenience store in Seattle that promises to streamline physical shopping and payment as the company has for decades smoothed out the wrinkles in e-commerce. Along with Amazon’s $13.7 billion acquisition last year of …

The PCI Security Standards Council on Thursday unveiled its Associate Qualified Security Assessor program aimed at reducing a shortage of data-security professionals in the payments industry. The Wakefield, Mass.-based PCI Council certifies QSA companies to perform assessments of a firm’s compliance with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard, the main …

Financial-services providers experienced a 105% increase in the fraudster attack rate from 2015 through 2017, reports ThreatMetrix Inc., an authentication and fraud-mitigation provider, in its “Cybercrime Report 2017: A Year in Review,” released on Tuesday. E-commerce merchants, too, experienced greater fraud, with the log-in attack rate growing by 170% from …

As technology firms, both within financial services and those entering it, take larger shares of banking revenue streams and become more like banks, financial institutions will beef up their tech investments as they attempt to counter this pressure, advises Aite Group LLC in a report on 2018 financial-services trends. In …

The Western Union Co. and the New York Department of Financial Services announced Thursday that the wire-transfer market leader will pay a $60 million fine to settle alleged violations of the state’s anti-money-laundering laws, including transactions that supported human trafficking from China. New York authorities alleged that between 2004 and …

If you ask consultants what’s holding back mobile payments in the United States, you’ll get answers ranging from lack of acceptance ubiquity to malfunctions at the point of sale to consumers’ perceptions that payment cards work just fine. Now the nation’s financial institutions have weighed in on the matter, and …

Boosted by e-commerce sales, growth in credit card payments far outpaced growth in debit card and automated clearing house payments in 2016, according to newly released findings from the Federal Reserve. Credit card transactions grew 10.2% from 2015’s levels to 37.3 billion and were valued at $3.27 trillion, the Fed …

Some 55% of all U.S. storefronts were accepting EMV chip cards as of September, according to the latest quarterly data from Visa Inc., released Monday. That comes to more than 2.5 million merchant locations, up 9% from June and 538% from September 2015, when 392,000 locations were accepting chip cards …

The PCI Security Standards Council named Lance J. Johnson to the executive director position. Johnson, who had been chief operating officer at Sequent Software Inc. for the past five years and spent 20 years at Visa Inc., replaces Stephen W. Orfei, the general manager who left earlier this year after …