credit card Archives | Restoring Liberty

All American Credit Cards Will Disappear In 2015 And Be Replaced With This New Tech

February 9, 2014/9 Comments/in Featured, News /by Jim Edwards

Photo Credit: instagram/ericabibi_These credit cards are dinosaurs.

Every credit card in the U.S. will be replaced by October 2015 with new cards that contain the chip-and-PIN technology that the rest of the world has had for years, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Both Visa and MasterCard are committed to the switch, which will render extinct the plastic in your wallets and purses right now.

No more black magnetic stripes; no more signing on the dotted line.

Americans who have traveled to Europe in recent years will know that the U.S.’s credit card system is embarrassingly old-fashioned by comparison. It’s often difficult to use American credit cards abroad because the Europeans abandoned magnetic stripes and signatures years ago — they were too easily hacked. Credit and debit cards in the U.S. are about 10 years behind the rest of the world.

IRS Now Using Technology to Track All Credit Card Transactions

May 2, 2013/0 Comments/in Featured, News /by RICHARD SATRAN

Photo Credit: US NewsThe Internal Revenue Service relies on technology more than ever to sniff out tax cheats using robo-audits and data mining—but so far it has caught lot of minnows, and big fish are still eluding detection.

Even as millions of people’s accounts are screened online and matched against their digital files elsewhere, the IRS’s data-detection tools come nowhere close to collecting the $400 billion in tax dodges estimated to take place each year. The area in which its robo-audits have had the most impact is on tax returns for low-income taxpayers who try to claim the Earned Income Tax Credit. In total, fraudulent claims totaled $2 billion, just 0.01 percent of the total of individual taxes. The EITC was the biggest single compliance problem cited.

That amount is expected to rise in the tax year ahead as the IRS extends the use of data mining to include the personal data of millions more taxpayers. Its sophisticated data-matching and pattern-recognition technology, largely developed by IBM over the past decade, will reach up the income ladder to include more middle-income and small-business filers who itemize deductions, although it is unlikely to have any impact on the complicated filings of high-net-worth taxpayers in the top 5 percent of income earnings, say tax experts who have studied the IRS plans.

“Real time” audits of electronic tax returns. The IRS’s next phase in high-tech tax collection will be to create a “real-time” check of tax returns to “match them to third party information,” said U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George in testimony before Congress. Starting this year, the IRS tools will be able to track all credit card transactions, for starters. The agency has also instructed agents on using online sources such as social media and e-commerce sites including eBay, as well as the rich data generated by mobile devices. In one controversial disclosure in April, the ACLU showed documents in which the IRS general counsel said the agency could look at emails without warrants, but the IRS has said it will not use this power.

Consumer Watchdog Fines Alec Baldwin’s Capital One for Deceptive Credit Card Practices

July 19, 2012/0 Comments/in Kathleen's Korner /by BEN PROTESS AND JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG

Capital One, one of the nation’s biggest banks, will reimburse $150 million to more than two million customers for selling them credit card products they could not use or did not want, as the nation’s new consumer watchdog leveled its first enforcement action against the financial industry.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Wednesday hit Capital One with findings that a vendor working for the bank had pressured and deceived card holders into buying products presented as a way to protect them from identity theft and hardships like unemployment or disability.

The regulatory actions, totaling $210 million including fines to authorities, take aim at one of the financial industry’s growing profit centers and increasingly controversial practices. Several other banks, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and HSBC, were sued in June by the Hawaii attorney general, accused of improperly selling similar so-called add-on products, which consumer advocates typically regard as costly and ineffective.

“We know these deceptive marketing tactics for credit card add-on products are not unique to a single institution,” said Richard Cordray, the director of the consumer bureau. “We expect announcements about other institutions as our ongoing work continues to unfold.”

Capital One — known for its catchy television ads that ask, “What’s in your wallet?” — did not admit to or deny any of the findings. While it said the wrongdoing had occurred at outside call centers that “did not always adhere to company sales scripts,” the bank’s president for credit cards, Ryan M. Schneider, acknowledged that the company was “accountable for the actions that vendors take on our behalf.”

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