KUALA LUMPUR (Jan 19): Visa Worldwide Pte Ltd has clarified that its Visa payWave payment feature is "extremely safe" to use following the circulation of reports discouraging consumers from using the service due to security breach.

"Visa payWave has been introduced in Malaysia since 2007 and is extremely safe. To date, we have seen over 1 million monthly Visa payWave transactions in Malaysia and it is growing at more than 60% month-on-month," said Visa country manager for Malaysia Ng Kong Boon in his statement today.

"Protecting cardholders and maintaining their trust in electronic payments is of utmost importance at Visa," he added.

Whilst there are staged demonstrations showing how credit card details could be lifted through a contactless card, Ng said, this scenario is complex to execute in reality.

"While it includes the card number and expiry date, the data itself offers very limited potential for fraud," he said.

As Visa payWave-enabled cards contain an embedded chip that uses advanced cryptography, a unique code is generated for every single card-present transaction used to authenticate the transaction.

"This is an example of one of the many layers of security that protect Visa payWave transactions. Visa payWave provides faster transactions and increased convenience while still maintaining Visa's high-security standards," Ng said.

Visa has said that so far, there are no reports of fraud from card-issuers or law enforcements globally stemming from such electronic pickpocketing fraud attacks.

It has also assured that all transactions processed by Visa's global processing network, VisaNet, are analysed in real-time for their fraud potential, using a comprehensive view of the global payments system to identify fraud patterns and detect suspicious transactions right at the check-out.