Fraud & Security

A growing feeling among independent sales organizations about more eyes looking over their shoulders came through Thursday at the annual conference of the MidWest Acquirers Association, a regional trade group. Jitters over the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuits against ISOs that processed for allegedly fraudulent telemarketers to increasing worries about data …

Biometric authentication will be in widespread use by financial institutions and online merchants by 2015, a payments-security expert predicts. “We’re at the threshold, it’s going to be common in the next year or so,” Al Pascual, a senior analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, tells Digital Transactions News. Pascual forecasts …

Payments executives already know the coming changeover from magnetic-stripe cards to chip cards using the Europay-Visa-MasterCard (EMV) standard will be expensive—about $11 billion, according to a new report from Aite Group LLC. But Aite notes that while likely to greatly reduce fraud at the point of sale, the big switcheroo …

Fearing that security worries could hinder mobile payments and other digital-payments channels, a handful of major banks are building a server-based switch that will mask consumers’ banking information when they perform transactions. Tentatively called Secure Cloud, the so-called thin switch is under construction at The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC, …

As the popularity of mobile remote deposit capture grows, some payments observers say the risk that checks might be deposited more than once may increase, as well. To be sure, there’s nothing new about the risk of duplicate checks. The problem has existed at least since the 2004 introduction of …

  More testing and documentation for payment card-accepting devices that process personal identification numbers are the order of the day under newly revised requirements from the PCI Security Standards Council. The revisions, dubbed Version 4.0 of the PIN Transaction Security (PTS) Point-of-Interaction (POI) requirements, are the first of three major …

  Just because a consumer’s financial information is compromised in a data breach does not mean the consumer will become a fraud victim. But the linkage between breaches and fraud is becoming much stronger, according to new data from Javelin Strategy & Research. Javelin recently reviewed data from its annual …

A formerly obscure lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission against Wyndham Worldwide Corp. and three subsidiaries in the wake of three data breaches at the hotel chain has become the flashpoint of a growing debate about the lack of a federal law governing data security on the Internet and …

  The shutdown of digital-currency network Liberty Reserve by federal prosecutors on money-laundering charges is part of the increased focus on the virtual-currency market by regulators and law enforcement agencies, but doesn’t necessarily mean all such currencies face the same fate. While Liberty Reserve shared some common features with Bitcoin …

  If the Federal Trade Commission has its way, all telemarketers will be banned from using remotely created checks and three other payment methods in any transaction. The sweeping ban, which the FTC posted this week in a proposed rulemaking, would also prohibit telemarketers from collecting payment via remotely created …