Legal issues and news

Outsiders gained access to customer information at Southern National Bancorp of Virginia using a malicious email. Other financial institutions, meanwhile, are implementing policies in hopes of avoiding the same fate.

The disagreement is tied to Walnut Street, an entity formed in 2014 to move certain commercial loans out of the bank. Separately, the company is facing a civil money penalty from the FDIC tied to issues with a third-party payment processor.

The spread of Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant and Samsung's Bixby is changing the way consumers interact with technology. Behind the scenes, artificial intelligence is doing more than ever to handle and protect payments.

Most larger credit unions have reissued chip-enabled cards, but some small CUs have lagged — and it’s nearly impossible to get an industry-wide picture of where adoption stands.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau filed a lawsuit Wednesday against Freedom Debt Relief and its co-CEO for allegedly deceiving consumers.

The Treasury Department on Wednesday named Kenneth A. Blanco, a longtime criminal prosecutor with the Justice Department, the director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Call centers are becoming a prime target for fraud due to some shockingly lax controls and the ease of social engineering attacks in an environment where employees are trained to put the customer first.

Wall Street and its allies in the House are trying to kill the Consolidated Audit Trail, a supercomputer that will allow regulators to detect market abuses, punish wrongdoers and better understand why markets sometimes crash.

The Fed’s new chief bank regulator wants to change “the tenor of supervision”; Ron O’Hanley, who was named president this week, will also take over as CEO by the end of 2018.

For most retailers heading into this year’s holiday-season sales crunch, the epic Equifax data breach was only the latest in a series of escalating threats that are having a profound effect on the way they handle payments.

China enacted sweeping changes to a business competition law to address fraud in the e-commerce industry, which is plagued by malfeasance ranging from fake positive reviews to merchants goosing sales numbers.

The HUD secretary’s comment that such use of the False Claims Act was “ridiculous” may delight the mortgage industry but does not bode well for taxpayers or the federal government’s future fraud enforcement efforts.

Four executives who sold stock after the company discovered a security breach had no knowledge of the incident when they made the trades, the company said. However, the status of federal investigations is unclear.

The Minnesota league follows on the heels of Pennsylvania, Nebraska and the Mountain West CU Association, all of whom joined the suit this week.

Readers weigh in on a blockchain-based credit bureau, react to the CFPB’s arbitration rule and chime in on calls to invest more in women.

The proposed 20% corporate tax rate would benefit banks more than other industries; online lenders made nearly a third of new personal loans in the first half.

Neural network systems — which try to emulate the human brain — will become increasingly important as the stolen identities from the recent Equifax breach and others start surfacing in the coming years on fraudulent payment card or loan applications.

CapStar Financial is suing an investor on claims he misled other shareholders and is trying to skirt bank holding company laws.

Rule that would have made it easier for banks to be sued is repealed; a survey says the technology isn’t a priority for bank CIOs.

With little fanfare, President Trump officially nixed the rule prohibiting financial firms from including mandatory arbitration clauses, earning praise from credit union trade groups.