Fraud & Security

At trade show after trade show, and in article after article, payments-industry executives have heard for years now that the U.S. migration to chip cards on the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) standard, while protecting the point of sale from counterfeit fraud, will force fraudsters to ply their craft online. Indeed, the idea …

Target Corp. reported Wednesday that expenses stemming from the big data breach it disclosed 11 months ago now total $248 million. The Home Depot Inc., meanwhile, said Tuesday that the data breach it disclosed in September cost it $28 million on a pre-tax basis in its recently ended third quarter. …

  First Data Corp. will update its TransArmor tokenization service in 2015 to make it platform-agnostic, while expanding the number of sales channels it is available through, says a First Data executive. Launched in 2010, TransArmor provides merchants a way to mask sensitive cardholder data by replacing them with a …

  Want to know where the chargebacks are coming from? Chargebacks911 has ranked the top five U.S. cities in terms of chargeback rates, placing a ZIP code in Show Low, Ariz., with a 2.2% rate, at the top. The study of 500,000 chargebacks of e-commerce transactions made in 2013 indicates …

  Consumers using smart phones and tablets based on Android, iOS and Windows Mobile operating systems tend to have lax security measures in place, finds a report commissioned by authentication vendor Nok Nok Labs. Google Inc. developed Android. Apple Inc. created iOS for its mobile devices, and Microsoft Corp. owns Windows …

n Card network Visa Inc. plans to eke out even better merchant compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard with a new enforcement plan targeting the largest merchants. The program is scheduled for a Jan. 1 start. That’s according to a copy of an Oct. 21 Visa Bulletin …

Just because merchants have until next October to install terminals capable of processing chip cards and avoid shouldering liability for counterfeit card transactions doesn’t mean most of them will have done so by that date. Many experts, and a number of merchants themselves, have made that point. But major terminal …

The newly rebranded Verifone Inc. this week made several product announcements. As the payments industry pays more attention to data security, Verifone this week said it is making its secure payment service Verifone Point available to all of the terminal maker’s direct customers and U.S. merchant acquirers and independent software …

Payments entrepreneurs and veterans alike view Bitcoin and other so-called cryptocurrencies as the new land of opportunity, but with the territory comes a considerable amount of legal risk. Federal authorities busted the Liberty Reserve and Silk Road ventures, the latter because it attempted to hide illegal activity by requiring customers …

By Jim Daly Attempting to do damage control in the wake of an email hack and unfavorable publicity about retailers who want to accept other mobile wallets, the chief executive of the retailer-sponsored Merchant Customer Exchange LLC (MCX) mobile-payments service said Wednesday that MCX is working with general-purpose credit card …