PayPal Buys Fraud Sciences for $169M
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Fraud Sciences, a private company, has developed technology designed to differentiate between real and fraudulent transactions.
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A senior government scientist who was a focus of a congressional probe into conflicts of interest in medical research admitted in federal court yesterday that he improperly failed to disclose payments of $285,000 he received as a consultant for the pharmaceutical manufacturer Pfizer Inc.
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McAfee will pay $51 million to acquire ScanAlert, which runs a paid service that scans Web sites for security vulnerabilities.
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Apparently it&#39;s not just unwary individuals that fall victim to online scammers. Even large corporations, it seems, can get suckered into parting with their money by devious&#160;phishers.Case in point: Eden Prairie, MN.-based grocery chain Supervalu, which earlier this year got conned into depositing more than $10 million into two fraudulent bank accounts before recognizing the ruse. Details of the case are contained in court documents filed in connection with two forfeiture cases stemming from the incident.According to federal court filings in the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho, the fraudulent activity took place in late February and early March this year. In the court filings, Stephen Kilgroff, Supervalu&#39;s vice president of legal affairs, said that on February 26 and 28 the company received two separate e-mails, one purporting to be from an employee at American Greetings Corp. and the second from an employee at Frito-Lay, both company-approved vendors.Both e-mails told Supervalu to send future payments for each vendor to new bank account numbers. In the case of the e-mail that purported to be from American Greetings Corp., Supervalu was advised to send payments to an HSBC account in Miami. The other e-mail advised Supervalu to send Frito-Lay payments to an account at First Security Bank in Rogers, Arkansas.Between Feb 28 and March 3, Supervalu deposited just over $6.5 million via multiple wire-transfers to the HSBC account, thinking that it was sending the money to American Greetings Corp. Similarly, on March 2 it made eight separate wire-transfers to the bank in Arkansas, depositing a total of $3.6 million to an account it thought belonged to Frito-Lay.In addition to the $6.5 million deposited by Supervalu into the HSBC account, an additional amount of $500,000 had been deposited into the same account by a second company, identified as &quot;ROHM&quot; on court documents. No information has been available concerning the second company, and it is not a party to subsequent litigation.Around March 6, according to the filings made by Kilgroff, Supervalu discovered that it had been &quot;induced&quot; into making the transfers to the bogus accounts. Following the discovery of the fraud, Supervalu quickly notified the appropriate law enforcement authorities, who managed to recover nearly all of the money before it could be withdrawn from the accounts.The recovered money is now being claimed by Frito-Lay, American Greetings and Supervalu. In making the claim to the recovered money, Frito-Lay said that it believes the money belongs to Supervalu and said supported that company&#39;s claim to ownership of the misdirected funds.&quot;However to the extent there is any determination that the ownership of these funds changed from Albertsons/Supervalu [the Albertsons grocery chain was recently acquired by Supervalu] to Frito-Lay (as a result of the attempted transfer, the misdirection, or any other development) Frito-Lay makes this claim to these funds in the alternative and subject to any claim of ownership by Albertsons/Supervalu&quot; the company said in an affidavit.A federal judge is expected to rule sometime in November on which firm should receive the recovered funds.A spokeswoman from Supervalu responded via e-mail to a request for comment. &quot;As indicated by the forfeiture complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney&#39;s Office in Boise, Supervalu was the target of attempted financial fraud,&quot; spokeswoman Haley Meyer said. &quot;Due to our internal controls and processes, we were able to quickly discover and report this to the FBI. As a result of the quick work of the Boise FBI Office and the U.S. Attorney, any funds lost are minimal.&quot;Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.&#160;
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The Founders Fund, a venture capital firm launched by PayPal co-founder  and CEO Peter Thiel, announced today that Sean Parker will join as  managing partner.
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EBay Inc.'s EBAY.O online   payments unit, PayPal, has signed an agreement with attorneys   general from 28 U.S. states to clarify how it notifies   consumers of the measures it takes to protect their financial   data, the company said on Thursday.
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Meg Whitman describes how eBay, Paypal are combating phony e-mails and Web sites that may ensnare unsuspecting users--and drive away customers.
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(InfoWorld) - PayPal unveiled a new Security Key on Friday that will add an additional layer of security to user accounts and help prevent online criminals from gaining access to them. The PayPal Security Key is a small electronic token that generates a unique code that can be used in addition to a user name and password when users sign in to their PayPal account.                                                     The company announced the news as part of eBay's week-long Developer Conference in Boston. It provides PayPal customers with so-called "two factor" authentication that makes it harder for online criminals to raid accounts, even if they do trick users into giving up their user name and password using online "phishing" scams, according to Michael Barrett, chief information security officer at PayPal. "This is something that will help the community to be more secure," Barrett told InfoWorld. PayPal and parent company eBay are top targets for online scam artists, who use dummy Web sites in so-called "phishing" attacks that attempt to trick users into revealing their user name and password. Those accounts can then be raided or used to fraudulently purchase goods. The Security Key isn't a silver bullet for phishing attacks, but just one part of a multi-pronged defense by PayPal and eBay, Barrett said. In recent months, the company has begun digitally signing all outbound e-mail messages and putting pressure on ISPs to take action on fraudulent mail that claims to come from both eBay and PayPal. More recently, the companies have been working with two leading ISPs in a beta program to automatically block all non-signed e-mail that claims to come from eBay or PayPal, according to Barrett and eBay CTO Scott Thompson. PayPal has been testing a beta version of the Security Key program in Germany and has already issued tens of thousand of the password tokens to its users. Already, the favorable response from users has been strong. "We never advertised this. It was all by word of mouth, but it's still been extremely popular," Barrett said. Starting Friday, PayPal will begin making the Security Key, which is part of the VIP (VeriSign Identity Protection) Network, available to its U.S. customers for a one-time fee of $5.00. PayPal users in Germany and Australia will also have the option to receive a Security Key, and PayPal plans to add other countries in the near future, according to a PayPal statement. PayPal and eBay began working closely with VeriSign after a deal to buy VeriSign's payment gateway business in October, 2005. PayPal has no plans to charge its customers for the token beyond the initial $5.00, which covers shipping and handling. Nor will the company levy a subscription fee for the two-factor authentication service. "This isn't something we're making money on," Barrett said. That said, PayPal will be paying attention to the number of users who adopt the password token and to the company's rate of fraud in an effort to figure out whether the tokens are worth the cost of the program, he said. Currently, fraudulent transactions amount to around $35.2 million dollars a year, or one third of one percent of PayPal's total global payment volume of $11 billion, Barrett said. Lowering that fraud rate even a little could offset the cost of the program. PayPal is also taking cues from other online financial services firms like eTrade, which launched a program in 2005 to allow all its U.S. account holders to use an RSA SecurID token for two-factor authentication, Barrett said. "eTrade has been pretty bullish about this," he said. "One thing that they noticed is that the customers who have (the token) use their account more because they feel safer," he said. Even before the news was announced, PayPal and VeriSign were promoting the new program on the floor of eBay Live at the Boston Convention Center, and VeriSign employees were handing out free PayPal tokens to attendees and signing them up for the new program. Charles Hu, an eBay Live attendee who sells concert tickets under the name "SummerComets" on the online auction Web site, said that he liked the idea of having an additional layer of security for his eBay account. "I'm always worried that someone will steal my password," Hu said. "I've seen (the password tokens) used in other industries, too." However, Hu wasn't ready to sign up for the program because he was worried that doing so would lock his wife out of their eBay account. "She's back at the hotel, so if I sign up now and they change our account, she's not going to be able to log in," he said. Barrett said that PayPal was prepared for the increased support calls that will come after the secure tokens are in widespread use but says that his company has a duty to protect customers from scams, even if it adds to the cost of doing business for PayPal and eBay. "Customers have been telling us they want this, so we're going to give it to them," he said.
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GlobalSecure Holdings Ltd. , a District-based private-equity investment firm that has bought three homeland security companies in the past year, last week wrapped up raising $23.5 million. Armed with this cash, it's aggressively searching for more companies in this field.
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Cisco Systems (Quote, Chart) acquired security monitoring provider Protego Networks in a $65 million cash deal Monday, one of a flurry of year-end mergers and consolidation among software providers in the past week.
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eBay, the online marketplace, is enjoying continued growth thanks to increased international sales and the success of its online payment service, Paypal.
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Some users of PayPal are having trouble logging onto the site and are getting security warnings -- problems apparently tied to an SSL security certificate used by Omniture, which is gathering data for the online payment site.
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Men&#39;s apparel seller Jos. A. Bank Clothiers Inc. has agreed to pay $475,000 to settle an investigation by New York Attorney General Eliot L. Spitzer, who accused the company of using deceptive
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EBay's PayPal payment division will pay $3.5 million to consumers and $1.7 million to 28 states in settlements for two different actions regarding its notification of users regarding their rights, the company said Thursday.
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PayPal, the online payments arm of eBay Inc., said Friday it will soon fine people up to $500 for uses related to gambling, adult content or services, and selling prescription drugs from non-certified sellers.
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Security beyond the firewall Check Point has made a bid to acquire Protect Data, the holding company for mobile security firm PointSec Mobile Technologies, in a cash deal valued at $586m (SEK 4,152m).â¦
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PayPal said late Tuesday that it has fixed a software glitch that locked some of its customers out of their accounts and crippled eBay users&#39; ability to complete online transactions.