Credit

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.

In 2007, Discover Financial Services began monitoring social-networking Web sites. By early 2008, the brand had built an in-house listening platform to follow blogs and postings about financial services in general and Discover in particular by “crawling” such sites as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube using key words and phrases.

American Express Co. is adding white to a rainbow of credit and charge cards that already includes green, gold, platinum, blue, black, plum and clear. The new color graces the Zync card, a charge card AmEx is marketing to 20- and 30-somethings with customized rewards, variable annual fees and a social network called the Zync Tank.

Verizon Wireless customers soon will be able to charge purchases of digital goods, such a games, to their monthly phone bills, bypassing cards and other payment channels. Verizon had not previously sold its customers any products other than its own offerings, such as ringtones, a Verizon spokesperson says.

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.

LIC Cards, a subsidiary of Life Insurance Corp. of India, plans to issue at least 500,000 credit cards in the next financial year, which ends March 31, 2011, an official from the card issuer tells PaymentsSource.

Dhanlaxmi Bank is countering recent moves in India by launching, not dropping, a credit card business by introducing platinum and gold cards on March 22, an official from the Thrissur-based bank tells PaymentsSource.

Visa Inc. will move to chip-and-PIN technology for all of its cards in New Zealand over the next four years, the card company announced March 24.

Some U.S. credit card issuers started responding to the down economy halfway through 2009 by raising over-limit fees to make up for lost revenue. Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America Corp., for example, raised its over-limit fee to $39 by July from $15 in January, while Wichita, Kansas-based Intrust Bank and Wilmington (Del.) Trust Co. raised their fees to $35 from $29 during the same time period, according to PaymentsSource research.

As card issuers compete fiercely for the choicest customers, two divergent strategies have emerged.

Strands Inc. said more than one-third of consumers in a survey were more eager to open credit card accounts in light of last year's Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act.

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).

The treasurer of Australia is expressing outrage over a plan by Westpac Banking Corp. to charge interest on the interest charges and penalty fees it levies on its credit card holders, calling the issuer in a news release a “serial offender.”

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.

Credit card charge-offs remained virtually flat in February, while delinquency rates fell for the fourth consecutive month, suggesting charge-offs may be nearing their “ultimate” peak after generally climbing for more than a year, Moody’s Investors Service said in a report this week.

Though other card issuers are “slicing and dicing” their portfolios to make up for economic hardship and the effect of the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009, Discover Financial Services is promoting in a new print ad its heritage of offering rewards, good customer service and no annual fees.

Visa Inc. on March 24 announced a strategic alliance with the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce designed to provide Hispanic-owned businesses with educational materials to help them manage cash flow and payments and to provide the “best available” interchange rates.

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.

Moody's Investors Service said Tuesday that credit card charge-offs rose slightly in February, adding that the stabilization was another sign of impending improvement in credit card performance, according to a Dow Jones report.

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Tech CU is providing its members with an enhanced list of methods to prevent being the victims of fraud through mobile banking.