Fighting Fraud
” Mastercard bolsters scam defense. “
The card network and rival Visa are each pursuing new rules to induce merchants and their banks to join the fight against fraud.
Mastercard instituted a new scam prevention program last week, seeking to draw merchants and their acquiring banks into the fight against fraud.
The card network now requires acquiring banks that process Mastercard payments for retailers, restaurants and other merchants to follow up within three days on certain flagged fraud activity. New rules under Mastercard’s Scam Merchant Monitoring Program went into effect Friday, according to a panel discussion at the Midwest Acquirers Association’s annual conference last week.
“There’s a lot of concern that’s coming out of Washington about consumers being scammed, and if you think about authorized transactions, where a consumer was fraudulently induced to engage in that transaction, that’s one of the things that the networks are concerned about,” industry consultant Ken Musante said in a Monday interview.
The new Mastercard program, also called SMMP, follows a similar move by the company’s larger rival Visa, which last year instituted the Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program, or Vamp, to press merchants and their banks to better combat fraud.
In May, Mastercard reminded merchants and their banks in a post on its website that it would be revising its approach this month to “drive greater consistency in fraud mitigation efforts.” Specifically, the Purchase, New York-based company emphasized a new time frame for addressing suspected scams.
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https://www.paymentsdive.com/news/mastercard-bolsters-scam-defense/826259/
