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Payments Giant Mastercard Launches Cryptocurrency Anti-Fraud Tool for Card Issuers

Payments giant Mastercard today is launching Crypto Secure, a new software product designed to help banks and other card issuers identify and block suspicious transactions from crypto exchanges, according to a CNBC report. A similar system is already in place for Mastercard’s fiat transactions, with the technology now expanding to Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies. Powered by CipherTrace, the crypto sleuth company Mastercard acquired last year, the tool uses “sophisticated” artificial intelligence algorithms and data from public blockchains to determine the risk of crime associated with crypto exchanges connected to the payments network. The platform offers a dashboard with color-coded ratings representing the risk of suspicious activity, with the severity of risk ranging from red for “high” to green for “low,” per the report. Crypto Secure itself, however, doesn’t make decisions on whether a specific crypto merchant should be restricted—the final judgment is down to the card issuers. “The idea is that the kind of trust we provide for digital commerce transactions, we want to be able to provide the same kind of trust to digital asset transactions for consumers, banks, and merchants,” Mastercard’s president of cyber and intelligence business Ajay Bhalla told CNBC.

Full story : Payments Giant Mastercard Launches Cryptocurrency Anti-Fraud Tool for Card Issuers.