CUNA Mutual Group has delivered what it is calling a comprehensive set of plastic card fraud prevention "best practices" to its 5,500 card-issuing policyholder credit unions, along with a strong call to action.
The nine-page booklet covers 13 security measures and provides more than 70 specific recommendations that card-issuing credit unions should immediately adopt, if they have not done so already. The booklets were mailed to credit unions, and electronic copies are available to policyholders within the Credit Union Protection area of www.cunamutual.com.
With the distribution of the booklet, CUNA Mutual is also recommending credit unions adopt:
* 24/7 review of potentially fraudulent activity.
* CVV (Visa) and CVC (MasterCard) Validation.
* CVV2/CVC2, the three-digit code on the cardholder's signature panel used to authenticate transactions, daily limits.
* The assertion of CUs' rights to recover fraudulent losses from merchants that improperly store card data and later suffer a compromise.
* Name Matching, in which the authorization system is set up to decline for all card programs when the name transmitted on the magnetic stripe doesn't match the cardholder's name stored on the credit union's master file.
* Exact Cardholder Expiration Date-An expiration date mismatch should be set to decline for both swiped (magnetic stripe read) and manually-keyed transactions.
* The use of an effective activation procedure for all credit and debit card programs, such as PIN-driven or calling from a home phone.
* Address Verification Service to allow mail, telephone order and Internet merchants to automatically match a cardholder's billing address to the shipping address.
