Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
By Jim Daly With the much-heralded EMV liability shift now less than a month away, the United States could be likened to briskly walking, though hardly running, toward the finish line of full-fledged chip card payments. New figures provided by Visa Inc. to Digital Transactions News on Friday show that …
Read More »Country Music Singer Hopes To Shed the Blues Through Mobile Payments
An unlikely panelist showed up Wednesday at the Fall 2015 Mobile Payments Conference in Chicago: country music singer and songwriter Rick Monroe, who urged his listeners to get down and get to work on apps that can help musicians sell songs and merchandise. “Mobile has become a way for artists …
Read More »Growing Mobile Use Among Consumers Is Attracting More Criminals, Says New Report
Growing consumer use of mobile devices like smart phones is making the devices more attractive to criminals trying to capture payments data. That’s the assessment from ThreatMetrix Inc., a San Jose, Calif.-based data-security company, in its “Cybercrime Report: Q2 2015” report, which analyzed more than 75 million attacks that were …
Read More »Lost Sales From Unfounded Rejections Dwarfs Actual Fraud Losses, Report Says
While a seemingly unending rash of data breaches has payments players scrambling to adopt a panoply of fraud-fighting technologies, little attention has been focused on the consequences for issuers and merchants when cardholders are wrongly turned down at the point of sale because of fraud suspicions. It’s a big problem—bigger …
Read More »Peril of New Chargebacks Could Bring EMV Into Focus for Unaware Merchants
A significant chunk—44%—of small-business owners have no knowledge of the EMV liability shift coming Oct. 1. That finding from “Small Business EMV Readiness,” a report released by Javelin Strategy & Research this week, suggests that many might be in for a shock when their merchant-processing statements arrive in November and …
Read More »Lying in Wait, Cyber Thieves Lick Their Chops in Anticipation of EMV Shift
The transition to an EMV-based payment card system in the United States could spur a long and sophisticated series of criminal attacks designed to separate consumers and banks from their funds. That’s one possible consequence, says Michael Bruemmer, vice president at Experian Information Solutions Inc.’s Data Breach Resolution group. “Cyber …
Read More »Eye on Security: Visa-Target Settlement; Ashley Madison Hackers Post Payment Data
Visa Inc. has struck a settlement with Target Corp. that would reimburse Visa’s credit and debit card issuers up to $67 million for their expenses related to Target’s massive data breach in late 2013. Meanwhile, hackers who stole data from the Ashley Madison Web site have posted seven years of …
Read More »Why Signature Authentication Trumps PINs When It Comes to EMV Credit Cards
By John Stewart Just 45 days to go until the Oct. 1 deadline for EMV in the United States, and among the issues over which merchants are still wrangling with banks is whether EMV chip cards should be universally issued with PINs—credit cards as well as debit. Merchant groups have …
Read More »Does a ‘Shimmer’ on a Mexican ATM Portend a Fraud Threat to U.S. EMV Chip Cards?
A variant of a skimming device called a “shimmer,” which steals EMV chip card data, has been found on an ATM in Mexico, raising security questions as the United States converts to the EMV standard. The shimmer incident was first disclosed Tuesday by security reporter Brian Krebs of the KrebsOnSecurity …
Read More »COMMENTARY: A Five-Point Checklist for Merchants Trying To Beat the EMV Clock
Credit card fraud in the United States is at epidemic levels. Last year, the U.S. accounted for more fraud than the rest of the world combined. And the fraud rates are accelerating. EMV technology, which has shown to greatly reduce in-store fraud in Europe, is finally being rolled out in the …
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