Visa is looking to keep people from stealing your credit card information with a new feature announced Thursday that lets you tell your bank know where you are.
The feature, called Mobile Location Confirmation (MLC), uses mobile geo-location to match up the coordinates of your smartphone with the location of where your card was used to make a purchase, according to Maine News Online. This technology allows the tool to determine if the transaction was authenticated or suspicious and easily predict instances of credit card fraud.
The move comes at a time when credit and debit card fraud is increasingly costing consumers and banks billions of dollars a year thanks to data breaches. The U.S. banking industry reported that $4 billion and $1.57 billion were lost in 2012 and 2013, respectively, due to credit card fraud.
MLC will establish a customer's home territory of about a 50-mile radius, where Visa transactions will be considered low risk for fraud, the Associated Press reported. The customer's phone will let the payment processing company know when they travel outside their home area into a new city or country, and the firm will know when the person makes transactions in that area and will be less likely to release a fraud alert for their card.
"We will be able to compare the merchant's location to the most recent cellphone location to show it's a less risky transaction," Visa executive Mark Nelsen said, adding that the goal is "to let more of those good transactions go through so we can focus on the real fraud."
While Visa's new anti-fraud software seems like an invasion of privacy, the feature is actually received praise from privacy experts who say it could reduce credit card fraud and keep consumers' money safe, the AP reported.
Nelsen pointed out how fraud is sometimes carried out with counterfeit cards, which are often not used in the area where the real card owner lives, and how Visa wants to prevent "a good portion" of such criminal activity.
Banks will begin updating their smartphone apps with Visa's MLC in April, Maine News Online reported. Consumers will be able to deactivate the feature whenever they want to, and Visa says it will not use the tool for marketing reasons.
