Technology

BOSTON – A 28-year-old college dropout who became the world’s biggest credit card hacker on Thursday was sentenced to 20 years in prison for stealing millions of credit union and bank account records from TJX Cos., BJ’s Wholesale Club, Office Max, Dave & Busters, Barnes & Noble and a string of other companies – even as he was working as a $75,000-a-year undercover informant for the U.S. government in identity theft cases.

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WorldNet TPS plans to use First Atlantic Commerce’s fraud-prevention services to further protect its online merchants from card-not-present fraud in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Europe, the companies announced this week. First Atlantic Commerce, a payment gateway and risk-management services provider, offers 3-D Secure and other customized consumer risk services in Europe and in the Asia Pacific and Latin American regions.

An Internal Revenue Service initiative announced earlier this month could spur independent sales organizations and merchant acquirers to assess how they classify their staffs, Holli Hart Targan, president of the Electronic Transactions Association, noted at the Southeast Acquirers Association conference this week in Atlanta.

FrontStream Payments Inc. will double its annual transaction-processing volume to $2 billion following last week’s acquisition of Fast Transact Inc., a Lacey, Wash.-based ISO, FrontStream CEO Emmet Seibels tells ISO&Agent Weekly.

Residuals are a standard form of payments revenue for ISOs and sales agents, but the weak economy, decreased transaction volumes and margin compression are making it more difficult for individuals to subsist on residual income alone. As some agents’ residuals grow tenuous, more salespeople are expressing interest in up-front revenue to bolster their incomes.

Compliance among small merchants with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard remains relatively low, but ISOs may be able to increase compliance rates in their portfolios by launching multifaceted campaigns, some industry insiders suggest.

Hancock Fabric Inc. has replaced every VeriFone Inc. 2000 PIN pad it deploys with new VeriFone MX850 terminals, according to Robert W. Driskell, the company’s executive vice president and chief financial officer. The company made the move after thieves replaced some PIN pads with fakes one (see story).

An Internal Revenue Service initiative announced earlier this month could spur independent sales organizations and merchant acquirers to assess how they classify their staffs, Holli Hart Targan, president of the Electronic Transactions Association, noted at the Southeast Acquirers Association conference this week in Atlanta.

How important is innovation to the business of banking today? The government appears to believe that financial innovations are at least partly to blame for the recent economic crisis, and to some degree this is true. Were it not for powerful secondary markets and instruments like mortgage-backed securities and CDOs, we may well have avoided the real estate bubble in the first place, leaving nothing to burst.