How are Credit Card Companies Tackling Identity Theft?

Credit card companies are losing millions of dollars every year to identity theft frauds, and are very conscious that if this kind of crime continues to grow many consumers will actually stop using credit cards in order to reduce the chances of becoming victims.  Therefore all of the major credit card providers are committed to tackling identity theft, and are devoting a lot of their resources into improving the security of their plastic cards and card transaction procedures as a whole, and also to providing a better service for those customers that do become victims of credit card fraud and identity theft crimes.

Zero Liability Policy

Many of the leading credit card providers such as MasterCard and Visa are offering their customers a ‘Zero Liability’ policy, which means that if they do become victims of credit card fraud they will not be held liable for any of the unauthorized charges made to their card accounts, and they will also have access to provisional credit limits so that they can still access money from their accounts whilst their cases are being resolved.

Visa Intelligent Scoring of Risk (VISOR)

This advance neural network system was introduced a few years ago and improves the security of the VisaNet card processing system by allowing each card transaction to be routed through the VISOR network for risk analysis.  This means that cards can be verified by comparing the details of previous spending patterns by the cardholder and databases containing any updated information relating to previous fraudulent activity.

Online Payment Gateways

Online card payment security has been greatly improved by new secure gateways, which are automatically triggered when the customer enters their card details into an encrypted online payment portal.  Visa Verified works by opening a new payment verification gateway in which the cardholder inputs their password.  They cannot proceed with the payment until the additional password details have been input, and so this protects against fraudsters trying to pay for goods online using stolen Visa cards.