Mastercard blames RoseOnly for spike in online card fraud
Mastercard’s Australian chief, Albert Naffer, has blamed Sydney online florist, RosesOnly, for a spike in last year’s official statistics for online credit-card fraud.
Card not present (CNP) fraud jumped from 38.6 cents to 50.2 cents in every $1000 worth of transactions in the statistics for the year to June 2008.
Online fraud is thought to have been responsible for the largest part of the jump, which saw overall payments fraud up more than 20% during the year.
Compared to last years overall average of 5.9 cents in every $1000 of payments, fraud sucked in 7.1cents of every $1000 in payments in Australia during
the year to 30 June 2008.
Collected by the Australian Payments Clearing Association, the figures include payments made by cheque and debit card as well as credit and charge cards.
But whilst growing rapidly, the figures still show that payments fraud down under is much less of a problem than in comparable western markets.
Press attention has, not surprisingly, focussed on the statistics for online-fraud, which is believed to be the major cause of CNP fraud.
(CNP fraud also includes telephone, mail and fax transactions).
Naffer, who is the business development manager in Australia for MasterCard Worldwide, told this morning’s edition of the banking industry newsletter,
The Sheet, that online card fraud was a growing problem.
“Online and particularly cross-border online is a significantly growing area, our fastest growth area of all the segments of card usage,” said Naffer.
And he specifically blamed Sydney based online florist, Roses Only for the spike in this years figure.
“This set of data captures the remnants of the Roses Only breach; there has been significantly less fraud in the last two quarters of the year
compared with the first two quarters” he said.
As we reported at the time, the security breach at Roses Only was something of a mystery.
Whilst the company acknowledged at the time there had been a breach, and the Fraud squad of the NSW Police set up a task force to investigate,
there have never been any prosecutions, or even conclusions about what went wrong.
Indeed, the problem appeared to have been blamed on Roses Only as a result of fraudulent transactions appearing on card holders’ statements.
The card holders apparently deduced that Roses Only was the online vendor who had let their card details go astray.
It was not as though Roses Only itself ever discovered a hack into its systems.
In fact, Roses Only CEO James Stevens, told eCommerce Report recently that there “never has evidence been found that any data was ever stolen from Roses Only.”
However he said that Roses Only had switched its payment gateway providers since the incident and now uses TNS to process online credit-card purchases.
“No credit card details are ever stored and TNS is our new payment gateway. All credit card transactions go through the TNS payment gateway, not us.”
For more information go to
www.apca.com.au
www.rosesonly.com.au
www.thesheet.com
www.tnsa.com.au
www.tnsi.com
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