Over the last year, I have had the pleasure of working with Fed colleagues and other payments industry experts on one of the Accredited Standards Committee's X9A Financial Industry Standards workgroups in writing a technical report on U.S. card-not-present (CNP) fraud mitigation. You can download the final report (at no cost) from the ANSI (American National Standards Institute) web store.

As this blog and other industry publications have been forecasting for years, the migration to payment cards containing EMV chips may already be resulting in a reduction of counterfeit card fraud and an increase in CNP fraud and other fraudulent activity. This has been the trend in other countries that have gone through the chip card migration, and there was no reason to believe that it would be any different in the United States. The purpose of the technical report was to identify the major types of CNP fraud and present guidelines for mitigating these fraud attacks to the various payments industry stakeholders.

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Source: Data from Card-Not-Present (CNP) Fraud Mitigation in the United States, the 2018 technical report prepared by the Accredited Standards Committee X9, Incorporated Financial Industry Standards

After an initial section identifying the primary stakeholders that CNP fraud affects, the technical report reviews five major CNP transaction scenarios, complete with transaction flow diagrams. The report continues with a detailed section of terms, definitions, and initialisms and acronyms.

The best defense against CNP fraud from an industry standpoint is the protection of data from being breached in the first place. Section 5 of the report reviews the role that data security takes in CNP fraud mitigation. It contains references to other documents providing detailed data protection recommendations.

Criminals will gather personal and payment data in various attacks against those who don't use strong data protection practices, so the next sections deal with the heart of CNP fraud mitigation.

  • Section 6 identifies the major types of CNP fraud attacks, both attacks that steal data and those that use that data to conduct fraudulent activities.
  • Section 7 reviews mitigation tools and approaches to take against such attacks. The section is subdivided into perspectives of various stakeholders, including merchants, merchant acquirers and gateways, issuers and issuer processors, and, finally, payment card networks.
  • Section 8 discusses how a stakeholder should identify key fraud performance metrics and then analyze, report, and track those metrics. While stakeholders will have different elements of metrics, they must each go to a sufficient level so the results will provide key insights and predictive indicators.

The report concludes with several annex sections (appendices) covering a variety of subjects related to CNP fraud. Suggestions for the improvement or revision of the technical report are welcome. Please send them to the X9 Committee Secretariat, Accredited Standards Committee X9 Inc., Financial Industry Standards, 275 West Street, Suite 107, Annapolis, MD 21401. I hope you will distribute this document among those in your institution involved with CNP fraud prevention, detection, and response to use as an educational or reference document. I think it will be quite useful.

Photo of David Lott By David Lott, a payments risk expert in the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Atlanta Fed