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NewsBriefs

Electronics, apparel and home goods will drive more
than half of purchases, while groceries and cosmet-
ics will show strong growth. AI traffic to retail sites is
expected to rise 520 percent compared with 2024, and
social-media-attributed revenue is forecast to grow by
51 percent YoY.
Card processing execs plead
guilty to fraud scheme
A long-running fraud case involving veteran execu-
tives of Electronic Transactions Systems Corp. con-
cluded Oct. 6, 2025, when defendants pled guilty and
agreed to forfeiture of $7.63 million after a three-year
saga including two mistrials.

The original indictment (July 2022) accused ETS prin-
cipals, under President Edward Walsh Vaughan, of de-
frauding merchants from 2012 to 2019 via undisclosed
fee markups, misleading contract disclosures and hid-
den processing charges. One victim, the City of Sher-
man, Texas, triggered the investigation.

Vaughan and key accomplice Hadi Akkad were even-
tually charged with money-laundering conspiracy.
Vaughan personally received $107 million from ETS's
2018 sale to Elavon; Akkad received $33 million. Under
the plea deal, Vaughan forfeited more than $5 million,
Akkad nearly $2 million, and each paid $100,000 fines.
Sherman received $34,184 in restitution. The case high-
lights how hidden interchange markups and opaque
contracts still pose systemic risk for merchants.

Payment fraud spawns online
insecurity, new survey finds

A survey of 13,000+ adults across 13 countries, con-
ducted for Mastercard Inc. by The Harris Poll, revealed
consumers feel more vulnerable online than they do
in the physical world: 70 percent of respondents said
securing their digital information is harder than pro-
tecting their home. Cyber-crime now generates an es-
timated $9.5 trillion annually and is ranked worldwide
as the third-largest economy.

The survey found 76 percent of participants more con-
cerned about cyber risks than two years ago; more than
half said they think about online security weekly, more
often than job security.

Eighty percent reported they received at least one scam
attempt in the past year. Gen Z and Millennials in the
study were more likely to fall for scams and less likely
to use traditional protective actions, despite higher
confidence in their ability to detect threats. Johan Ger-
ber, Mastercard's global head of security solutions,
warned that trust cannot be an afterthought; organiza-
tions must weave security into every technology layer,
or risk failing in the digital economy.

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