Take the fraud news challenge! 6/19/17

Are you staying on top of the online fraud and abuse headlines? It’s time to test your knowledge! Fill in the blanks below. No cheating! And don’t forget to check your answers when you’re done.

Fill in the blanks!

1. A new study from Mastercard and Oxford University suggests that 93 percent of consumers (and 92 percent of banks) would prefer to use _____ instead of passwords.

2. The New York Times is teaming up with Alphabet to fight _____ with machine learning technology.

3. According to a survey from TD Bank, almost everyone seems to think that payments fraud will _____.

How did you do?

1. A new study from Mastercard and Oxford University suggests that 93 percent of consumers (and 92 percent of banks) would prefer to use biometrics instead of passwords.

Passwords are a pain. If you’re anything like the average consumer, you have to remember around 90 passwords at any given time. In fact, 1 in 4 consumers has to reset one password a day – every day! – and 21 percent forget their password again in 2 weeks. And passwords a pain for e-commerce sites, too: people routinely end up abandoning their carts at checkout because they can’t remember their password. People deal with the pain by slacking on their password hygiene.

Thanks to Mastercard and Oxford University, we now know exactly how much of a pain passwords are. Almost everyone wants to get rid of them in favor of thumbprint scanners or other biometric technology. To be exact, 93 percent of consumers and 92 percent of banks are pushing for biometrics.  Because both businesses and consumers are sharing the pain, the biometric revolution may come sooner than previously expected.

2. The New York Times is teaming up with Alphabet to fight the comments section with machine learning technology.

You’ve heard it before, and so has the New York Times (NYT): don’t read the comments section! To deal with the often toxic comments readers leave on their articles, the NYT has closed comment sections on all but 10 percent of their pieces. Other news organizations like NPR, reuters, and Recode have done away with comments sections entirely.

But thanks to machine learning, that could change very soon. The NYT is now using an algorithmically-driven app called Perspective to parse trollish comments from good ones. Perspective will flag questionable comments, which will then be passed on to a (human) team for manual review. The NYT hopes to open a quarter of their articles to comments with Perspective’s help…and even more than that, once the comments sections are fit to print.

3. According to a survey from TD Bank, almost everyone seems to think that payments fraud will get a lot worse.

To end this article on an optimistic note: TD Bank recently polled attendees at the Electronic Payments Associate conference, finding that 91 percent believe payment fraud is about to get much worse over the next 2 or 3 years. When asked why they’re so pessimistic, respondents noted that the “criminal toolbox is expanding.”

Many attendees have had firsthand experience with this toolbox. In fact, most said that at least one of their clients had been involved in some kind of hack or security incident over the past year.