Fraud & Security

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 …

Seeking to contrast the merchant-acquiring industry’s actual practices with the impression created by the government’s Operation Choke Point that acquirers turn a blind eye to shady merchants, the industry’s leading trade group on Monday said its members last year discharged more than 10,000 merchants for fraud. That statistic comes from …

The PCI Security Standards Council has hired a former MasterCard Inc. executive as its new general manager to replace the retiring Bob Russo, and point-of-sale terminal maker Ingenico S.A.’s mobile-payment subsidiary Roam Data has a new leader. Russo, who became the PCI Council’s first general manager in March 2007,about six …

The U.S. Department of Justice’s controversial Operation Choke Point, an effort to cut off high-risk merchants’ access to electronic payments by challenging the banks and processors that serve them, continues to draw fire. The latest missile comes in the form of a bill from U.S. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-Mo., who …