Prepaid cards

As shopping gets more digital, so does fraud. The rise in technology at shoppers' fingertips provides many new channels for scammers to exploit.

In an effort to crack down on consumer fraud, the Federal Trade Commission announced Wednesday that it will ban telemarketers from using four payment methods that are frequently abused by scam artists.

Volkswagen AG's "goodwill gesture" of $1,000 worth of gift cards to owners of cars with engines that pollute more than the law allows is helping the company identify those autos when it comes time to fix them, Audi of America President Scott Keogh said Tuesday.

Gift cards don't seem like the coolest technology in the payments world, but new and reinvented digital gifting platforms are changing the conversation – by borrowing text-messaging staples like emoji.

The alliance between JPMorgan Chase and the Merchant Customer Exchange represents more than an olive branch between two industries that have typically been at war over fee revenue — it's a result of a years-long transformation in how Chase approaches its relationships with the retail sector.

Most mobile wallets clearly favor one industry over another, with banks and retailers often pitted against each other in a battle over payment card fees. JPMorgan Chase just made a stunning move by conceding some of this ground to the benefit of the Merchant Customer Exchange.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray issued a public rebuke of RushCard on Friday, warning that it must rapidly fix technical glitches that have left customers locked out of their accounts.

UniRush's transition to a new processor caused major service interruptions for users of its popular RushCard prepaid products.

Eyeing Kuwait as a hotspot for technology development, online payment provider paysafecard is bringing its prepaid services to the country as a springboard to establishing itself in the Middle East.

As Uber-like business models perpetuate, bringing more contractors into a world where their job functions are handled primarily through a mobile app, there are still some pain points for which plastic is well suited.

Mobile wallet providers are trying lots of strategies to widen the audience for mobile payments, including increasing transaction size and, in suretap's case, adding support for prepaid cards to attract younger consumers.

General purpose reloadable prepaid cards continue to evolve, exceeding the expectations of many, and in some ways are helping to shape the future of banking.

American Express is introducing one of the payments industry's first prepaid debit cards with cashback rewards in an age where the best rewards are typically reserved for the more lucrative credit card market.

Total System Services (TSYS), the Columbus, Ga.-based payment processor, has hired Patricia A. Watson to be senior executive vice president and chief information officer, effective Sept. 14.

The issues tied to its MoneyPak reload cards continue to plague Green Dot Corp., despite the prepaid card issuer's decision to discontinue the product back in 2014.

To eliminate its fraud-prone MoneyPak reload cards, Green Dot introduced a swipe-to-reload system last year that seemed more streamlined but added a new requirement — the customer had to have the card present to top it up with cash.

With regulatory scrutiny from the Card Act of 2009 and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, various prepaid and gift card products have come and gone in recent years. InComm's Vanilla Gift Card is not one of them.

Nearly a year to the date since he left his role as CEO of NetSpend, Dan Henry may have found the new "aha moment in payments" he said he would seek as the next chapter in his career.

Starbucks and American Express are both using cross-merchant rewards to boost their own volume, but with a very different philosophy driving each company's program.

Meta Financial Group in Sioux Falls, S.D., agreed to sell $3.1 million of common stock to a group of existing investors and reached a separate agreement to issue prepaid cards for a business partner.