Mastercard hopes it will be able to discover that credit and debit card numbers have been compromised before they fall into the hands of cybercriminals.
NEW YORK — Mastercard said Wednesday it expects to be able to detect when credit and debit card numbers have been compromised before they fall into the hands of cybercriminals.
In its latest software update, rolling out this week, Mastercard is integrating artificial intelligence into its fraud prediction technology, which it hopes will spot patterns in stolen cards sooner and allow banks to replace them before criminals use them.
“Generative AI will help us figure out where your credentials may have been compromised, how do we identify how that happened, and how do we quickly remedy that situation, not just for you, but for other customers who may not yet realize they were compromised,” Johan Gerber, Mastercard's executive vice president of security and cyber innovation, said in an interview.
Purchase, New York-based Mastercard says the new update will allow it to offer cardholders faster replacement of bad cards by using other patterns and contextual information, such as geography, time and address, and combining that with incomplete but compromised credit card numbers that appear in its database.
The patterns could also be used in reverse, using batches of fraudulent cards to find potentially compromised merchants or payment processors. Gerber said this pattern recognition goes beyond what a human can do with a database query or other standard methods.
Billions of stolen credit and debit card numbers are floating around on the dark web, available for any criminal to purchase. Most were stolen from merchants in data breaches over the years, but a significant number were also stolen from unsuspecting consumers who used their credit or debit cards at the wrong gas station, ATM or online merchant.
These compromised cards can go undetected for weeks, months, or even years. It's only when the payment networks themselves dig into the dark web to find the stolen numbers, merchants learn about the breach, or cards are used by criminals that the payment networks and banks become aware that a set of cards may have been compromised.
“We can now actually proactively reach out to banks to provide services to consumers, issue new cards and allow consumers to continue with their lives with as little disruption as possible,” Gerber said.
Payment networks are primarily looking to move away from “static” credit and debit card numbers (the same card number and expiration date across all merchants) to numbers that are unique to a particular transaction, but that transition could take years to materialize, especially in the United States, which has tended to be slow to adopt payments technology.
According to EMVCo, the technology organization behind chips in credit and debit cards, chip cards are now used in more than 90 percent of face-to-face transactions around the world, but in the U.S., that figure is closer to 70 percent.
Mastercard's update comes as its main rival, Visa Inc., is also looking for ways to get consumers to use 16-digit credit and debit card numbers. Visa Inc. announced major changes last week to the way credit and debit cards operate in the U.S. that will mean Americans will carry fewer physical cards in their wallets and the 16-digit credit or debit card number printed on every card will become less important.
