Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
Just as legitimate transactions are a certainty in payments, so too, are fraud and scams. That doesn’t mean payments companies and their vendors need to just accept that. Now, Mastercard Inc. says it is countering fraud and scams with a new service, Mastercard Merchant Trust Services, to help clients identify and thwart fraud. Separately, Darwinium is updating its Android and iOS developer toolkits to take on remote access scams.
Mastercard’s Merchant Trust Services will tap into the card brand’s networkwide intelligence, cyber, and identity capabilities, it says, to help better identify legitimate merchants from risky ones, both in-store and online.
The service will help acquirers and payment service providers root out scam merchants during the onboarding process. Mastercard’s efforts echo moves by competitor Visa Inc. to ferret out bad merchants via its Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program.
Mastercard also is tweaking acquirer involvement in how they monitor their merchants. Starting in July, it will shorten the window between when a suspicious indicator is noticed and enforcement begins by requiring acquirers and payment facilitators to “actively monitor merchant behavior and to initiate an investigation within 72 hours when potential scam activity hits a certain risk threshold.”
If the suspect activity is confirmed, the merchant must be stopped from accepting Mastercard transactions, it says. The expectation is that the faster detection will thwart more bad actors from committing fraud.
“If we want everyone to benefit from the digital economy — from a small business starting out to a family shopping online—then trust has to be built in, not bolted on after something goes wrong,” Ann Johnson, Mastercard executive vice president of security solutions, says in a statement. “The price of convenience should never be fear.”
Mastercard also launched an issuer service called Merchant Scam & Risk Indicator to help issuers with merchant risk signals during the authorization process, which should aid fraud mitigation, it says.
In related news, Darwinium says its updates for its Android and iOS software development kits will help banks, payment providers, and digital businesses take on the proliferation of remote access scams.
The updates include screen-sharing detection as well as live-call detection on platforms such as Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Slack, which scammers are using to social-engineer victims.
San Francisco-based Darwinium says the updated SDKs are already in use with banks in Southeast Asia to identify mule networks at scale. Mule networks are used to launder money.
