Fraudsters hit Apple Pay with Home Depot and Target cards

Apple Pay has been hit by a number of fraudulent transactions using credit card data previously stolen from big retailers including Target and Home Depot.

About 80 per cent of the purchases were made at Apple’s own stores, where pricey items are in greater supply than at other Apple Pay affiliated stores such as Whole Foods.

 A Wall Street Journal source said that fraudsters are loading stolen card data onto Apple Pay, which allows them to make purchases without the physical card being present. While banks, rather than Apple, are responsible for verifying customer information before cards can be used for Apple Pay, the fraudulent purchases will be a setback for the new mobile payments system.

Apple is already seeing increased competition from Samsung and Google, with both tech companies boosting their mobile payments efforts.

Banks are making changes to their security procedures to better handle Apple Pay-related issues, people familiar with the matter have said.

Hackers stole data from 56 million cards in an attack on Home Depot last year, while 40 million cards were compromised by the Target breach at the end of 2013.

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