ATM and debit card fraud is expected to grow 10 percent or more this year, even though credit card fraud may get most of the publicity.

Retailers fighting what they say are high payment-card acceptance costs are not letting the heated debates about health care or President Obama's planned troop surge in Afghanistan push interchange off the political stage.

Proposals to cut certain fees credit card issuers charge merchants would be challenging to implement, the Government Accountability Office said in a report recently. The charges, known as interchange or swipe fees, have been the subject of growing controversy in recent years. Retailers must pay issuers the fees--set by credit card networks such as Visa and MasterCard--every time a customer uses credit to make a purchase.

U.S. credit card companies are raking in big bucks from charging interchange fees while consumers and businesses continue to struggle amid a weakened national economy, a government report said recently.

If merchants on the one side and bank card issuers and payment card networks on the other were looking for endorsements of their opposing positions about interchange, they didn't get them Thursday when the Government Accountability Office issued a long-awaited report about the controversial fee.

U.S. merchants are incurring $191 billion in fraud losses each year, according to a new report released today by LexisNexis® Risk Solutions.

Lloyd Constantine, who maneuvered the card industry into paying the largest antitrust class-action settlement in history, has resurfaced six years later with a book about the case and some surprising criticism about other lawsuits that he sees as riding his coattails.

The cost of accepting credit cards is a sore point for merchants. Business owners have long grumbled about the cost of taking credit cards, and for the first time, Congress is considering regulating how the fees are set.

After some serious retail pushback - particularly in the gas station sector - Visa has relented and agreed to back off an earlier deadline PIN pad compliance deadline for July 1, 2010, some 7-and-a-half months away. The new policy isn't threatening fines until Aug. 1, 2012.

The interchange partisans went at it again recently in Congress. The battleground this time was a House Financial Services Committee hearing on the bill from U.S. Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., that would require more interchange disclosures and demolish most of the bank card networks' rules that prevent merchants from discriminating against card-paying customers.

7-Eleven Inc. misled consumers who signed a petition asking Congress to regulate card interchange, MasterCard Inc. charged one day before officials with the convenience-store chain were expected to deliver nearly 1.7 million signed petitions to Capitol Hill.

7-Eleven has announced that its franchisees and store operators have collected more than 1.6 million signatures in the "Stop Unfair Credit Card Fees" petition drive. 7-Eleven says it believes this marks the largest number of signatures collected for a public policy issue on record.

In the latest encroachment of credit and debit cards onto the greenback's turf, the high-end New York City restaurant said goodbye to dollars and cents this week. The message to diners: Tip in cash if you wish, but otherwise, your money is no good here.

As an attorney for the merchant plaintiffs predicted earlier this summer, Visa Inc. disclosed Monday that it plans to prepay the remaining $800 million of its settlement obligations with merchants under the so-called Wal-Mart debit card class action for a discounted $682 million.

It's very difficult to get small businesses interested in PCI compliance at all (judging from low attendance at the webinars and events aimed at that market). Recent research attempts to understand why that is, and if anything can be done to raise awareness and motivate security improvements.

MasterCard is taking what can only be called a "get tough" policy, issuing larger fines and, most significantly, forcing both Level 1 and Level 2 merchants to use assessors rather than take on the task of self-assessment. But still, merchants, banks, processors and service providers aren't happy with MasterCard.

Despite widespread efforts to educate small merchants about the Payment Card Industry data-security standards (PCI DSS), a large majority still don?t understand fully the complex requirements, according to a study released today by the National Retail Federation, ControlScan and the PCI Knowledge Base.

MasterCard has become the first card brand to publish its PCI fines and related requirements, a move that could be the latest signal that MasterCard wants to step out of the PCI shadow of its larger rival, Visa. The dollars themselves do not reflect a radical change, although they do include some healthy increases.

Shopping for new shoes or groceries for tonight's dinner? What about a birthday gift for a friend? It's easy - just pull out the plastic. But what shoppers might not realize is that every time they swipe that credit or debit card, the merchant is actually incurring a fee.

A sustained tide of consumer anger about all types of bank fees is adding momentum to the long-running merchant campaign against interchange.

MasterCard Inc. plans to pay off its remaining $400 million settlement obligation to retailers over debit card acceptance early for a discounted $335 million, according to a filing the card network made on Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

MasterCard has changed its PCI rules and is now insisting that all Level 2 merchants have on-site assessments.

U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin?s introduction of a Senate companion to U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr.?s Credit Card Fair Fee Act of 2009, along with a little-noticed bill introduced last month in the House, bring to three the number of interchange bills pending in the Democrat-controlled Congress.

The Credit Card Fair Fee Act, a bill that would inject government into the interchange-setting process, has been resurrected after dying in committee last year. But this time there are more players around the table seemingly less inclined to sympathize with the defenders of the current bank card interchange system.

Visa, the world's largest payment network, said recently that U.S. legislation curbing certain practices by credit card companies would force the industry to restructure as revenue expectations shrink.

After reaching its highest level in 14 months, the economic confidence among small business owners fell in May as owners reported cash flow concerns and expect to cut back on business development spending, according to the latest Discover Small Business Watch.

The U.S. House of Representatives on May 20 overwhelmingly passed a sweeping credit card reform bill that leaves out retailer-backed regulation of interchange. The bill, which the Senate sent to the House Tuesday, includes a Congressional interchange study and could open the door to controls on gift cards.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. paid discount fees totaling more than $1 billion to take credit and debit cards in the 12 months ended Jan. 31. Acceptances costs now exceed health-care premiums at The Home Depot.

Visa recently announced that spending on Visa debit cards in the U.S. had surpassed Visa credit card volume for the first time in the company's history.

Economic confidence among small business owners rose to its highest level in 14 months in April as more of them see the broader economy and the conditions for their own businesses improving, according to the latest Discover Small Business Watch.

If you're a small business owner, you've probably received numerous offers and applications for a small business credit card. You probably wonder whether you should consider getting one or how they differ from other forms of credit.

72% of companies in a recent survey said the economic downturn had not led to a change in their e-business technology investment plans, and more than half of business-to-consumer companies said they planned to increase their budgets for e-business technology, Forrester Research Inc. says.

The Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and the Electronic Funds Transfer Association jointly hosted a conference, "Maintaining a Safe Environment for Payment Cards: Examining Evolving Threats Posed by Fraud." The conference included panels representing each of four key constituencies: issuers, consumers, merchants/acquirers and networks, speaking on the nature of payment card fraud in the 21st century landscape.

Online merchants shouldn?t wait for chargebacks to indicate a problem with fraudulent orders. Instead, they should pay attention to other indicators, such as the volume of canceled orders, to anticipate whether a wave of chargebacks is about to hit.

Lower interchange rates in some cases for online retailers and travel-and-entertainment merchants that accept Visa credit cards and a new MasterCard authorization fee that's 3.7 times higher than the one it will replace are set to take effect in April when the bank card networks adjust pricing schedules.

Economic confidence among the nation's 22 million small business owners remained flat in February, gaining only a half-point over the previous month in the latest Discover Small Business Watch. The monthly index rose to 71.9 in February from 71.4 in January.

The crooks are using Visa gift cards to create their own credit card by adding stolen numbers, a name, and an expiration date. When they're swiped nothing happens, but then the clerk is asked to type in the credit card numbers.

International e-commerce can be risky for U.S. and Canadian merchants, says a new report from payment processor CyberSource Corp. During 2008, 30% of merchants that accept international orders online and that CyberSource surveyed stopped taking orders from one or more countries because of high levels of fraud.

With the recession throwing more and more people out of work by the day, payments processors are reporting that their merchants are experiencing sharp increases in e-commerce chargebacks stemming from so-called friendly fraud. This is the fraud that results when a consumer repudiates a transaction as unauthorized in hopes of escaping liability for payment.

Discover Financial Services has announced it is rolling out an enhancement to its Discover Information Security and Compliance (DISC) program that the company says "will streamline the validation and reporting process, making it easier for merchants that process transactions on the Discover Network to communicate their compliance with the PCI Data Security Standard (DSS)."

Interchange, the most controversial part of credit and debit card pricing, is the subject of a background paper MasterCard Inc. recently posted on its Web site.

MasterCard Worldwide has announced it has published a new white paper titled "Benefits of Open Payment Systems and the Role of Interchange" that the company says "dispels misperceptions about payment systems and explains the tremendous economic value that electronic payments bring to the economy as a whole and their role in advancing commerce."