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.
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