Tag: credit card fraud

Customers who are traveling may soon find it easier to charge their purchases with this added layer of protection.

When Visa customers travel to another country, a new mobile security feature from the credit card issuer may make it easier for them to be able to prevent fraudulent charges or having to overcome the automatic protection barriers that the bank may implement when trying to make a purchase.

The strategy is meant to make it easier, safer, and more convenient for Visa customers to shop abroad.

Travelers currently need to call their banks to tell them that they will be traveling, and where, or they risk having their cards frozen from the first moment that they are used in a foreign country. Visa is hoping to be able to prevent both of those occurrences from being required by using mobile security to be able to track the customer’s location and know that he or she is the one who is using the credit card when it is swiped at any terminal in the world.

The mobile security service uses geolocation technology to verify the customer’s position when a card is swiped.

This lets Visa check to make sure that the customer and the card are in the same place when a purchase transaction is attempted on the card. This is done by checking the location of the customer’s mobile device. Should there ever be a mismatch, additional security measures will be taken in order to help to determine whether or not it is a legitimate purchase attempt, without necessarily cutting off the card, right away. This way, if a smartphone is left in a hotel room, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the customer will be without the use of his or her cards.

This method of using the location of the mobile device makes it less likely that a bank will be required to mistakenly decline a transaction that looks suspicious but that is actually legitimate. The company is working its mobile security feature into a module. This way, banks can incorporate it into their own mobile banking apps. Then, when a customer travels and tries to use the card, a partner of Visa, Finsphere – a geospacial analytics company – pings the app in order to be able to locate the customer’s device. That finding is then reported to Visa to see if it is a match.

When a credit card transaction is denied outside of its owner’s home country, up to 80 percent are false positives.

Mastercard is now using geolocation technology in order to help to reduce the frequency of “false positives” that are occurring when one of their customers has attempted to use his or her card in a legitimate way, but has had the transaction denied as it registers as potentially fraudulent.

This is an opt-in service that allows a customer to be matched with his or her location to validate a transaction.

This service uses the geolocation technology in a customer’s smartphone so that when they leave their home country and attempt to use their credit card, their location can be confirmed as being the same as that of the transaction, so that the purchase will not be flagged as a potentially risky one and a false positive can be avoided. For this program, MasterCard is working with Syniverse, an IPX provider, which has access to over six billion individual mobile subscribers who are located in over two hundred different countries.

The goal of this use of geolocation technology is to use mobile security methods to boost transaction authentication.

According to the CMO of Syniverse, Mary Patterson Clark, “We’re providing an additional layer of fraud protection for when a consumer is on the road.” She added that “Over and above the existing fraud protection, [MasterCard is] offering this additional opt-in fraud protection offer to their customers.”

What Clark described was a system in which the MasterCard certificate generates a token and then sends it to the platform that has been enabled by that credit card giant and Syniverse. With this, Syniverse is able to compare the location of the MasterCard and the location of the user at his or her last registration update. If those two positions are nearby, then the transaction will not be flagged as potentially fraudulent.

The company is not only hoping to continue with the reduction in false positive identifications of fraud that it has already been achieving through this geolocation technology, but it will also use it to help to make it easier for travelers to purchase prepaid data packages while they are away from home.