Fraud & Security

Already eyed with suspicion by various arms of the federal government and states, virtual currencies now are the subject of a warning issued Monday by the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB released a six-page advisory about the risks consumers face when using new forms of electronic money. “Virtual …

Visa Inc. on Thursday announced a new network service to flag high-risk transactions at fuel pumps, and the PCI Security Standards Council published guidance to help merchants and other organizations that handle payment card data manage their relationships with third parties to whom their outsource data-security tasks. n Visa calls …

With a major deadline arriving in October 2015, U.S. payments players are expected to be busy in the coming months converting systems to be compliant with the Europay-MasterCard-Visa chip card standard. But with liability for counterfeit card fraud shifting in 14 months to the party not prepared for EMV, how …

Target Corp. on Tuesday issued an update on its data-breach expenses for the second quarter that brings total costs to $236 million, including expenses in the first quarter and late 2013. The Minneapolis-based retailer expects gross breach-related expenses in the second quarter to be $148 million, offset by $38 million …

  Merchant groups and payment-industry members both want to use tokenization to make it tougher for criminals to get to sensitive cardholder data, but a disagreement has erupted about the best way to do that. On Monday, the Food Marketing Institute, Merchant Advisory Group, National Association of Convenience Stores, National …

Visa Inc. moved on Thursday to commercialize mobile payments using cloud-based near-field communication technology with its release of Visa Cloud Payment Solutions. A related development, the announcement of the upcoming debut of a tokenization service, is aimed at locking down cloud-based NFC and other digital payments. The new services include …

After beefing up its bill-payment services through two acquisitions in 2013, ACI Worldwide Inc. is now turning its attention to fraud prevention. The Naples, Fla.-based payments-software firm on Monday announced that it plans to buy prominent e-commerce fraud-detection and prevention services provider Retail Decisions Plc (ReD) for $205 million in …

The PCI Security Standards Council has placed Trustwave Holdings Inc.’s business of assessing payment-processing software for compliance with a major security standard “in remediation,” an official term that means probation. Chicago-based Trustwave is one of the biggest firms, if not the biggest, in the business of assessing merchants and processors …

PayPal Inc. enjoyed a solid quarter of growth despite what eBay Inc. chief executive John Donahoe characterized Wednesday as a “challenging” first half. One of the biggest of these challenges, according to Donahoe, was a data breach that occurred in late February or early March and that led PayPal parent …

They came in for more bashing at a House subcommittee hearing Tuesday, but several federal government officials at least got a chance to give their opinions about the controversial Operation Choke Point, an effort by the U.S. Department of Justice supported by bank regulators that aims to cut off access …