Unfortunately,
once again, the United States is number one in something that is not terribly
positive. The United States sees more money lost to credit card fraud than the
rest of the world combined. From statistic gathered from 2012, research firm BI
Intelligence estimates the United States was responsible for 23.5% of all
payment card volume globally, but had 47.3% of the payment card fraud. The
biggest fault actually lies on the credit card industry which does not want to
invest in new technologies to enhance protection against fraud as that will cut
into profits. For example, magnetic stripe payment cards have become relatively
easy to copy, and in many other countries, the governments have pushed adoption
of EMV or ‘chip’ cards which are much harder to copy.
However,
the credit card industry does plan to finally plan to adopt EMV cards within a
year and a half, and push retailers to share in the costs of upgrading to new
card reading technology. In the fall of 2015, credit-card companies will hold
merchants who don’t accept EMV cards liable for fraudulent transactions from
magnetic stripe cards. However, this is not a guarantee from the credit card
industry that they will issue EMV cards in the first place. Cards with a chip
cost 4 times as much to manufacture as cards with a magnetic stripe. Knowing
the credit card companies, their bottom line profit is far more important than
the pain experienced by its customers via credit card fraud. Industry analyst
David Robertson of the Nilson Report expects the credit card companies to sit
on their hands waiting for smart phone based payments to become prevalent so
they don’t have to upgrade to EMV cards.
In
the meantime, credit card fraud continues to grow. Not only are personal
computers at risk of hacking for credit card information, but big data hacking
has started to become a huge trend. At the beginning of 2014, Target announced
it had been hacked and although the initial estimates of the data breach
varied, it was finally determined that over 110 million customer records were
stolen. So basically, the credit or debit card information of over a third of
all adults in the United States of America was sold into the black market. So,
the odds are one out of three that you’re a victim. Target absolutely refuses
to divulge any information on how this data breach occurred.
Just
this past week in September, Home Depot announced it was hacked and data was
stolen. Home Depot, upon seeing how the press skewered Target and afraid of
lawsuits, really does not want to say just how much data was hacked and taken. Industry
analysts have made an educated guess that up to 60 million customer records
were stolen and some suggest far more. Customers need to protect their
financial information more than ever.
Mobile
Labs Corporation promotes a suite of products to combat credit card fraud. For
instance, the flagship product, xmVerify, has each credit card transaction text
messaged to a user’s phone so they can personally review and authorize each and
every transaction, thus decreasing the possibility of a fraudulent transaction
coming through. The xmBilling platform allows its users to verify each
automatic billing transaction to again insure each transaction isn’t fraudulent
while making sure each bill payment is timely. They also market the platform
xmOne, which provides a secure environment to perform transactions via mobile
phone for prepaid accounts, such as university and college campus card systems.
While
the large card issuing banks slug it out with the big retailers over who is
ultimately responsible for fraud losses and who will be responsible for
protecting the customer, it’s the smaller rapidly growing and innovative
businesses like Mobile Labs Corporation that are devising the solutions that
ultimately will protect the financial transactions of the American public.
For
more information, visit www.mobilelads.com
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