Aperia Compliance, a subsidiary of IXOPAY, has recently unveiled Card Testing Reimbursement, a safeguarding initiative aimed at mitigating the financial burdens associated with card testing fraud for acquirers, independent sales organizations, and processors.
The official press release indicates that this new offering is available as an additional service to existing breach and risk management programmes.
Card testing involves the deliberate misuse of unprotected transaction entry points to conduct a large number of authorizations with various card numbers, enabling criminals to pinpoint valid accounts. Common entry points for such attacks include exposed or poorly secured payment gateway credentials, gateways without velocity checks, and weak implementation of CVV, address verification, or 3D Secure controls. In 2022, Stripe reported its fraud prevention systems were intercepting over 20 million card testing attempts daily during a significant attack surge.
Scope and market positioning
Card Testing Reimbursement is structured to provide financial assistance post-incident, covering the increased costs of authorizations and network-related expenses that often rise sharply during major card testing events. It does not function as a monitoring or prevention tool but serves to supplement current preventative measures like script monitoring, velocity controls, and authentication enforcement.
Aperia markets this product as filling an existing gap in the market where card testing attacks result in genuine financial burdens, including unexpected network and authorization fees and operational overhead for fraud, risk, and support teams. It does not always prompt conventional breach response protocols since no cardholder data is typically compromised.
Tony Norrie, President of Aperia Compliance, highlighted that card testing represents a costly mystery in the payments industry because it fails to fit into traditional breach categories but still incurs significant costs across the board, transforming what initially seems like ordinary transactions into unanticipated charges and disruptions.
