Smart introduces phone feature to combat fraud

The mobile payments company of Smart Communications is introducing a feature that will allow ATM and credit card users to “lock” and “unlock” their credit cards using their mobile phones to combat fraud.

A statement Friday showed that Smart e-Money had rolled out the “LockByMobile” service.

This will allow a prepaid, debit or credit card holder to block and un-block the use of the funds in their cards through a few clicks on their mobile phones, Orlando Vea, Smart e-Money  president and CEO, said in the statement.

The service would likewise be made available to payment cards issued by banks worldwide through mobile phones provided by any operator, said Vea.

It can be applied using smartphones or feature phones.

Smart Communications is a unit of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co., the country’s biggest telco provider.

“Given recent developments, LockByMobile is a timely solution that can be quickly implemented by banks and mobile operators and provide greater peace of mind to payment card users,” Vea said.

Concern over payment card fraud has risen sharply because of several recent, highly-publicized security breaches of customer information systems, the statement showed.

In December 2013, Target, a major retailer in the United States, disclosed that hackers had penetrated its network and stolen the payment-card information of over 40 million customers.

A few months before that, Adobe Systems reported what it called a “sophisticated” cyber-attack on its network that compromised confidential customer information of several tens of millions of its customers.

Security breaches such as these are expected to further fuel payments fraud. Estimates put the total global payment-card fraud losses at around $11.3 billion in 2012, up 15 percent from the year before. The United States accounted for nearly half of the total, the statement showed.

The service’s  patented features include the Transaction Date and Time Stamp Lock which prohibit transactions at defined dates and times such as when the user is overseas or during hours when the probability of the user making a purchase is low.

The Merchant Category Code Lock prohibits transactions with merchants belonging to certain categories, which the user has a low probability of making any purchase from.

The Merchant Name Lock prohibits transactions with blacklisted merchants.

The Transaction Amount Lock prohibits transactions above a certain set limit by the user.

Country Code Lock and Currency Code Lock prohibit transactions in certain countries and transactions made in certain currencies, respectively.