Phishers are casting their lines at more brands in hopes of luring Internet users into divulging data that they can use fraudulently, according to a new study from the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG). According to the study, which covers the first half of 2013, criminals targeted 720 brands, up almost …

Social-media payments specialist Chirpify on Thursday introduced a service that lets marketers promote hashtags on a wide variety of media to solicit purchases. The so-called action tags can appear on TV or radio commercials, in print advertising, or on billboards and then be used on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, the …

By John Stewart n Independent sales organizations are starting to feel squeezed by technology companies selling tablet-based point-of-sale solutions to merchants, according to terminal kingpin VeriFone Systems Inc. So VeriFone on Wednesday rolled out a tablet-based platform for its resellers that they can price and market to their merchants. n …

  VeriFone Systems Inc. continued on its road to recovery during its third quarter of fiscal 2013 ended July 31, a road that led the leading U.S. point-of-sale terminal maker through a sharp drop in revenues in some countries and ended with a $1.9 million loss versus a $37.7 million …

Microsoft Corp.’s $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia Corp.’s handset business, announced late on Monday, brings to the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant a pioneer in near-field communication technology and allows it to combine hardware with a mobile operating system in the manner of rivals Google Inc. and Apple Inc. It remains …

By Jim Daly Following a summer of uncertainty over whether millions of uninsured consumers would be unable to buy medical insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) because they didn’t have a checking account, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) this week issued a rule that requires …

Love your local vending machine and it’ll love you back. That’s the message from USA Technologies Inc. (USAT), operator of a wireless network of card-accepting vending machines. USAT this week unveiled a loyalty program called “More” centered around a proprietary, reloadable stored-value card that machine owners and operators can offer …

By Jim Daly The coming update to the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) will include new guidelines about physically protecting credit and debit card terminals, when third-party vendors share security responsibilities with merchants, protecting card data in a computer system’s short-term memory, and strengthening passwords, among others. The PCI …

By Jim Daly The big merchant acquirer Chase Paymentech Solutions LLC on Tuesday announced a mobile-payments service that includes a reader that plugs into smart phones as part of a broader new service for small businesses called Chase Checkout. After testing the service in five states, Dallas-based Chase Paymentech quietly …

By Jim Daly B is back. That is, what the Federal Reserve Board back in 2011 dubbed “Alternative B” for implementing the transaction-routing requirements in the Dodd-Frank Act’s Durbin Amendment. Alternative B would have required each debit card to provide the merchant access to at least two signature and two …