As fraud continues to be a growing concern in the payments industry, companies continue to develop new solutions and partnerships in an attempt to stem the tide of bad transactions, stolen identities and other types of fraud.
    According to a nationwide survey conducted by First Data Corp., there were about 2 million new identity thefts from phishing in the last year. The study also says that over 40 percent of adults have received a “phishing” attempt and as many as 54 million Americans have been victims of ID-related fraud to date.
    About 5 percent of phishing attempts are successful, according to First Data.
    To educate consumers on how to recognize phishing schemes before they become victims, First Data is teaming with Regions Financial Corp. to distribute a series of radio, television and print public service announcements. Regions is a founding member of the Identity Theft Assistance Center (ITAC), a non-profit cooperative industry initiative to help victims of identity theft by streamlining the recovery process.
    First Data subsidiary, TeleCheck Services Inc., recently added Star Network’s Star Check direct service to enhance its security offering.
    TeleCheck’s proprietary database and fraud solutions use adaptive decision technology and its proprietary database of national check information. Star Check Direct gives TeleCheck the ability to verify funds availability and checking account status in real-time during a transaction. TeleCheck will also support real-time check debits later this year.

    VeriFone Holdings, Inc. recently signed a joint development and marketing agreement with Pay By Touch, aimed at furthering the adoption of consumer biometric payment solutions to combat fraud.
    Under the agreement, the companies will work together to enhance the security, encryption and compatibility of each other’s solutions. In addition, both companies will offer the Pay By Touch consumer biometric payment service as an integrated offering with VeriFone’s family of payment solutions. Both companies will also collaborate on new product development, marketing, and sales of the integrated solutions.

    Visa USA today announced the rollout of new patent-pending technology designed to stop fraud at the checkout line. Called Advanced Authorization, the new technology will give all Visa cardholders, merchants and financial institutions new fraud protection.
    Advanced Authorization instantaneously detects potential fraud occurring not only on individual cardholders’ accounts, but throughout the Visa network, which Visa expects to help aid in real time against coordinated attacks on multiple accounts.
    When a Visa card is swiped, Advanced Authorization provides an instantaneous rating of that transaction’s potential for fraud to the financial institution that issued the card, including whether it was part of a reported data security compromise.
    The issuer is then able to send an immediate response back to the merchant whether to accept or decline the transaction, based in part on the sophisticated evaluation provided by Visa’s Advanced Authorization. This new technology is being applied to every Visa credit and check card purchase. Issuing financial institutions determine how to incorporate the expanded fraud information into their existing risk systems.
    Advanced Authorization builds on Visa’s neural networks that have proved effective in detecting unusual spending patterns and monitoring for fraud in individual accounts.
    Visa says the incidents of fraud on its cards are at an all-time low of just 5 cents per $100, even as the volume of Visa card transactions has grown.

    CardinalCommerce, a payment authentication company and ComCity, a provider of Internet solutions for small companies and large corporations, have joined forces to provide merchants the 3-D Secure payment authentication initiatives.
    Cardinal Centinel authentication software has been integrated into ComCity’s SalesCart.Net platform, in order to comply with the Visa and MasterCard authentication payment initiatives. Merchants’ utilizing the SaleCart.Net software now have the ability to access the 3-D Secure payment authentication initiatives, Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode.

    MasterCard International reports that it has helped shut down nearly 1,400 phishing or spoof sites globally over the past 11 months as part of its aggressive global campaign, named Operation Stop IT ( Identity Theft). Nearly a quarter of which were traced to Asia/Pacific.
    Between June 2004 and May 2005, MasterCard also successfully uncovered and took offline more than 700 carding and e-commerce websites brokering illegally obtained payments card numbers. Of these, some 3 percent were traced to Asia/Pacific, according to the company.
    Launched in June of 2004, the Operation Stop IT program has aggressively targeted online identity theft via 24/7 Internet monitoring to identify online credit-card trading rings, phishing scams and other forms of payment fraud targeting the MasterCard brand, its customer financial institutions and cardholders.