New payment types such as digital currencies and instant payments require new approaches to ensure the safe delivery of payments to the intended recipients.
Academic institutions, on the forefront of technology, are adept at quickly addressing real-world opportunities through research and innovation. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta will partner with academic institutions to work on promoting payments integrity. We will share data and ideas that result from these partnerships with the payments industry to influence new solutions and processes.
Georgia State University
Payment innovations such as digital wallets, mobile payments, and person-to-person payment apps offer convenience, but they also expose users to new types of fraud. Bad actors can steal users' social security numbers, addresses, authentication credentials, and account details and sell them in markets hosted on encrypted web channels. This identity fraud causes harm that reaches across the financial system and broader economy.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and Georgia State University's Evidence-Based Cybersecurity Research Group are collaborating to find solutions to address online payments-related financial fraud.
- Using a strategy identified by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the research group is surveilling the dark web and encrypted web channels to better understand the implications of online criminal payments-related activity. The two teams will analyze their findings and share them within the Federal Reserve System and with the payments industry to promote safer, more efficient payment solutions and practices.
- The research group is also working to identify how the introduction of central bank digital currencies (CBDC) will affect online criminal markets in other countries. CBDC is a general term for a version of currency that may use an electronic record or digital token to represent the digital form of a nation’s currency.