Figures from The Australian Payments Clearing Association (APCA) showed fraud on cheques, credit and debit cards rose from 7c in every $1000 of payments to 9c, an increase of almost 30 per cent.
The biggest contributor was an increase in fraud where the card was not present, mostly transactions over the internet, - The Australian reported.
The amount of transactions on Australian cards in this category of fraud increased from $65.5 million to $82.1m in the 12 months to June.
APCA chief executive Chris Hamilton said card-not-present (CNP) fraud was growing and it was important to tackle it early because of the expected rapid growth in use of the internet with the arrival of high-speed broadband. "The National Broadband Network is going to lead to more of a problem unless we have this under control," Mr Hamilton said. An online fraud typically started when a person's credit card number was stored online to make regular transactions easier and was then stolen by a hacker. Or a virus on an individual's computer could record their keystrokes as they entered their card number.
Here's my favorite part of the story: Mr Hamilton said the payments industry's two main lines of attack were having the cardholder's financial institution track their spending for unusual payments (nah...there's a better way) or a new internet-only PIN
We don't need an Internet "ONLY" PIN, just another thing to remember...instead, our PCI Certified PIN Entry Device uses existing PINs. But let's say there was an "internet only" PIN. Our device could do that too. And since we are the manufacturers of the ONLY PCI 2.x certified PED in the world, I really like the APCA chief executive's suggestion to combat CNP fraud. Like I've been saying. "It's Only a Matter of Time" before everyone realizes that in order to conduct secure transactions on the web, it has to be done outside the browser. HomeATM literally eliminates "card not present" fraud by changing the whole environment into a "Card Present" one. Can anything be more simpler than that?
