It’s a laurel, of sorts, that financial firms would like to rebuff. They sustained the largest share of phishing attacks in the fourth quarter, accounting for 27.7% of all attacks, followed by the broad “other” category at 18.2%, and webmail, software-as-a-service at 17.7%. That’s according to the Phishing Activity Trends …

When fraud losses are mostly owing to consumers’ naivete, how can banks and networks react? They’re starting to figure that out. Consumers are at the heart of person-to-person payments and criminals know it. Criminals also know consumers can be the weakest link in securing P2P payments against their attacks. In …

Early Warning Services LLC Monday morning issued a report from its chief executive reporting significant first-quarter growth for the company’s Zelle peer-to-peer payments network and underscoring efforts by EWS, owned by seven of the nation’s biggest banks, to combat fraud and scams. Though the report, signed by four-year CEO Al …

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 …

Fraud isn’t always the work of hardened criminals. Online sellers must learn how to spot—and thwart—clever amateur thieves, as well. Did you take up a new hobby during the pandemic? I finally picked up the guitar that had been lying there since high school. Many new hobbies have become cherished …

Early Warning Services LLC, operator of the Zelle peer-to-peer payments network, is celebrating a year just passed in which both dollar volume and transactions processed rose at double-digit rates. But the company also has its eye on promising markets like small businesses and on countering charges from U.S. Senators about …

Even though the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will be working to secure its future throughout much of the year, the agency still has big regulatory plans for 2023. As this column discussed in November, the Bureau will be facing court fights over the prepaid-accounts final rule and, separately, the source …

Looking to speed payments through the automated clearing house while reducing risk, Plaid Inc. announced late Thursday the rollout of Signal, a machine-learning risk engine. Plaid has been piloting Signal for more than a year with select customers that generate high ACH volumes. To accelerate ACH transactions and make them …

The online shopper going by “Michael Smith,” who lives in Houston, may not be a living, breathing consumer, according to new research from Socure, a digital identity verification provider. This consumer, with seemingly valid credentials, may be a synthetic identity meant to defraud merchants. So-called synthetic fraud, already accounting for …

Electronic Verification Systems, a provider of identity- and age-verification solutions, early Monday announced the launch of AssurePay, a credit card-verification platform that EVS says authenticates consumer credit card information at the beginning of the payment process, instead of while the card data is being held for processing. To validate a …