Cyber criminals took no time off in the first six months of 2019 as human-initiated attacks against online sites grew by 13% from the same period a year ago, finds the LexisNexis Risk Solutions Cybercrime Report released Tuesday. Bots, too, evolved to target new account creations. Bot attacks targeting new …

U.S. merchants added 600,000 locations for EMV chip card acceptance in 2019’s first six months, and Visa issuers cranked out an additional 10 million EMV payment cards, according to new figures from Visa Inc. In its latest update on the U.S. conversion from magnetic-stripe payment cards to the EMV chip …

The Zelle peer-to-peer payments network is starting to click for the smaller, everyday transfers it was designed to handle. Early Warning Services LLC, the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based banking-technology company that runs the 2-year-old network, reported on Tuesday that Zelle handled $44 billion in volume in the second quarter on 171 million …

Likening Amazon Prime Day, which takes place July 15-16, to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, threat-detection firm Cyberint warns that so-called threat traffic will run 30% higher than usual in the days leading up to, including, and shortly after Prime Day, in line with the volume experienced during the holiday …

While most North American payments fraud is related to identity and organized crime, one area—terrorism—stands out in this region compared to other developed markets. Eight percent of the 154 criminals cases reviewed by information-security firm Terbium Labs in its “The Next Generation of Criminal Financing: How Payment Fraud Funds Transnational …

EMV chip cards continued to gain share of U.S. card payments in early 2019, although their conquest is not yet complete more than three years after the payment card networks’ EMV liability shifts. But Visa Inc. says counterfeit fraud is dropping sharply, as intended. Visa reported Thursday that 3.5 million …

Fraud attacks involving rogue mobile applications jumped nearly 300% in the first quarter from the preceding quarter, and fraudulent card-not-present transactions rose 17%, fraud-control services provider RSA Security says in a new report. Bedford, Mass.-based RSA says it flagged 41,313 attacks from rogue apps compared with 10,390 in 2018’s fourth …

Amazon’s tech-laden Go stores are disrupting in-store checkout. But as other merchants look to follow suit, it’s becoming clear there are lots of ways to get the checkout to check out. Consumers so loathe waiting in line at checkout  that half of all shoppers avoid entering stores with long lines, …

On the heels of a robust holiday shopping season come some sobering statistics. The recently released 2018 “True Cost of Fraud” study by LexisNexis Risk Solutions shows a 35% increase in fraud for midsize to large e-retailers over 2017. In the retail sector, the monthly average of fraudulent transactions jumped to 306 from …

Unbridled enthusiasm for distributed ledgers has given way to a more sober assessment of the technology’s probable role in payments. A few years ago, evangelists for blockchain confidently predicted its widespread adoption to facilitate faster, more secure, and economical payment transactions.  The type of transaction didn’t matter. Whether it was …