Fraud & Security

First Citizens Bank & Trust Co. reached an agreement with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to buy Silicon Valley Bridge Bank after a competitive bidding process. Terms include FCB’s assumption of $110 billion in assets, $56 billion in deposits, and $72 billion in loans. Starting Monday, the 17 SVB branches will operate as …

Buy now, pay later provider Affirm Inc. announced its users can deploy the service at VersaClimber, a vendor of exercise machines. Cybersecurity firm McAfee Corp. will offer savings on online protection via a new agreement with Mastercard Inc.’s Easy Savings program, a service through which business cardholders receive rebates on common business expenses. Strike, …

Cybercriminals showed no signs of slowing down in 2022 as they employed a variety of schemes to defraud consumers, acquirers, card issuers, and merchants, according to Visa Inc.’s Spring 2023 Biannual Threats Report. Cryptocurrency was a prime target for cybercriminals. More than $3 billion in cryptocurrency was stolen through November …

Mastercard Inc. is adding another arrow of digital-security technology in its cybersecurity quiver with the acquisition of Baffin Bay Networks, a Sweden-based cybersecurity company. Payments companies constantly need advanced ways to counter fraud because criminals are relentless. In fact, credit card fraud accounted for 6.2% of digital fraud in 2020, …

E-commerce wasn’t the only market that ballooned after the pandemic set in. Fraud took off, too, and attracted novice practitioners in the bargain. Of more than 1,000 consumers surveyed by Sift Science Inc. for a report it released Thursday, some 16% admitted they had committed payment fraud, or knew someone …

As if cryptocurrency didn’t have enough problems with the financial failure of the major FTX exchange, plummeting values, and, most recently, links to two of the biggest bank failures in U.S. history, now criminals are running scams built around crypto trading to defraud consumers. The scams, known as “pig butchering,” …

With merchant risk being as important for payment facilitators as it is with traditional merchant-services companies, Infinicept, which provides embedded payment services, and LegitScript, a merchant-monitoring service, are collaborating on a new service to provide merchant-monitoring capabilities. Announced Wednesday, the service will enable payfacs, independent sales organizations, and merchant acquirers …

If there is one constant about fraud, it’s that it never takes a holiday. A new report from Nice Actimize, a provider of fraud-prevention solutions, reveals that attempted fraud transactions skyrocketed in 2022 by 92%, compared to 2021, and that the money criminals attempted to steal soared by 146%. The …

Silvergate Capital Corp. said it will wind down its operations and return deposits to customers after it was forced to sell assets at a loss. Silergate last year acquired the assets of stablecoin venture Diem Group, formerly known as Libra. U.S. retail sales in February, excluding automotive, were up 6.9% from February 2022, …

Among some 108 banks in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, nearly half indicate they have lost at least 10% of their payments volume to fintechs, according to an Aite-Novarica report supported by payments platform Finastra. As a result, some 65% plan to make a significant or moderate investment in payments technology …