Fraud & Security

Tokenization is not a new concept. Yet, while the process has improved card security across a variety of industries, there still exists myriad misinformation about why it’s important and how to best implement it. I’m going to argue that an approach called host card emulation (HCE) is the safest and …

  Biometrics will be the secure authentication mechanism for 65% of all mobile-commerce transactions in five years. That’s the forecast from Acuity Marketing Intelligence, a Denver-based research firm, in its “The Global Biometrics and Mobility Report: The Convergence of Commerce and Privacy” report released last week. The forecast says this will …

The Electronic Transactions Association, the national merchant-acquiring trade group, is ramping up its presence on Capitol Hill to stem the increasing regulation of the payments industry. The Washington, D.C.-based ETA recently spawned the creation of so-called payments caucuses in both the Senate and House of Representatives, chief executive Jason Oxman …

Two independent sales organization executives who ran afoul of government regulators cautioned their industry colleagues Thursday on how to stay out of trouble. The warnings came during a session at the MidWest Acquirers Association (MWAA) annual conference in Chicago titled “You, Me and the FTC: Personal Stories From Being in …

With the impending EMV chip card liability shift on Oct. 1 and the recent establishment of the newest version of the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI), independent sales organizations are at a critical juncture, according to a veteran industry executive. “This is an opportunity for ISOs to gain or …

The United States appears to be making steady progress in its conversion to the EMV chip card standard. Some 120 million chip cards were issued by the end of last year, a figure expected to balloon to 600 million by the end of 2015, according to the EMV Migration Forum, …

You may have heard the term, “friendly fraud.” It’s no surprise, then, that there’s nothing friendly about it. And it’s quickly becoming a major problem for merchants across the globe. Friendly fraud, also called friendly-fraud chargebacks or cyber-shoplifting, occurs when a customer makes a purchase online and then files a …

The PCI Security Standards Council this week updated its standards governing point-to-point data encryption (P2PE) and card-reading devices for the point of sale, ATMs, kiosks and mobile devices. One of the key changes in the new Version 2.0 of the P2PE standard will make it easier for security-solutions providers to …

Leading ATM manufacturer NCR Corp. this week issued a warning about a new variant of card skimming that gives an ATM user no clue that the machine’s card reader is stealing debit card information. Meanwhile, a report says payment cards used at a theme park in Hershey, Pa., may have …

By Kevin Woodward Encryption technologies, which mask sensitive card data with mathematically derived characters and numbers, appear to be the security method that resonates best with merchants. That’s the result of a Digital Transactions News survey that asked about EMV, tokenization, and encryption. Forty-five percent of respondents cited encryption, followed …