With 2013 seeing a further increase in online payment fraud, maintaining consumer confidence in payment products is essential and has become that little bit more challenging. In a world of ever larger transaction volumes, the attraction for criminals is obvious. And with fraudsters often apparently one step ahead of the systems put in place to stop them, it is down to the constant vigilance of the payment industry to monitor the latest fraud threats and take suitable action to protect their customers’ payment data.

One example of this is around the spate of scams involving open loop prepaid cards. These cards, which had originally been thought fraud-proof, in part due to funds on the cards being the responsibility of the customer rather than the card issuer, have been used on a number of occasions to steal millions of dollars in surprisingly short amounts of time.