Fraud & Security

Merchant processor Global Payments Inc. says it believes fewer than 1.5 million card numbers were taken from its processing system in a data breach disclosed on Friday. Meanwhile, Visa Inc. has removed Global from its list of merchant processors compliant with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI), but Global …

Merchant processor Global Payments Inc. confirmed late Friday afternoon that it sustained a data breach following press accounts earlier in the day of a breach variously reported as affecting 50,000 to potentially millions of payment cards. In a press release, Atlanta-based Global “announced it identified and self-reported unauthorized access into …

Online travel agencies are well-known fraud targets, and now new data from CyberSource Corp. suggest that fraudsters make more attempts against them than other sectors of the travel industry. But the data also show that the so-called OTAs’ fraud losses as a percentage of revenue are actually less than elsewhere …

Payments fraud against companies moderated during 2011, with the share of companies experiencing payments fraud falling to the lowest level since 2004, according to the Association for Financial Professionals’ latest annual study of corporate payments fraud. Nevertheless, the level of fraud remained elevated, with the majority of organizations reporting attempted …

Amazon.com Inc. quietly killed its PayPhrase online-authentication service on Feb. 20, not quite two-and-a-half years after introducing the system. The PayPhrase credentials system allowed online shoppers to check out using only a word or phrase of their choosing and a PIN that they had registered with the Amazon Payments service. …

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Countless news reports have reported or speculated about what Google Inc., Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., and Facebook Inc. have done or might do in mobile payments. Consumers, however, don’t rate these four companies as highly as they do their own banks or traditional payment companies in trustworthiness involving their financial …

Dissatisfied with the current crop of mobile-payments systems from tech companies, cell-phone providers, card networks and banks, a group of U.S. retailers is embarking on its own plan to bring smart-phone payments to their customers. The merchants stress that their venture will not necessarily be based on near-field communication (NFC), …

After bottoming out in 2010, identity fraud rose nearly 13% last year, according to new findings from Javelin Strategy & Research. Javelin’s findings also associate two hallmarks of the tech-oriented early 21st Century, social networks and smart phones, with a higher risk of identity fraud. Pleasanton, Calif.-based Javelin surveyed 5,022 …

Some of the nation’s biggest merchants have been adamant for months that they prefer EMV payments with PINs, not signatures, and on Thursday they were joined in that sentiment by a panel of representatives from some of the country’s largest processors. In the face of tepid support, at best, for …