An interesting story from the Korea Times about the use of digital certificates in Korea. It turns out they're about to start charging users fees for these certificates.

Reuters is reporting that the US Government has arrested a Texas man and charged him with using false emails to "phish" for personal information. More details on the case against accused phisher Zachary Keith Hill are available on the FTC's web site.

In addition, the Criminal Division of the US Department of Justice has just published a Special Report on Phishing (pdf).

nPost.com has posted an interview with Kurt Huang, CEO of micropayment provider BitPass.

NACHA has announced that its board has approved in concept charging a new fee that would be automatically assessed to originating depository financial institutions (ODFI) for every ACH payment that is returned for unauthorized reasons, and for every WEB and TEL payment returned for administrative reasons.

Cyota announced this morning that it has begun seen more sophisticated phishing attacks being launched against financial institutions. These new attacks use multiple spoofed web sites -- making it more difficult for financial institutions to get the rogue sites shut down.

NACHA this morning announced its volumes of ACH transactions processed during 2003. A total of over 10 billion ACH payments were processed during 2003 -- growing 12 percent over the prior year -- including over 1.3 billion e-check transactions.

Checkfree and NetDeposit have announced a teaming arrangement to provide corporate billers and remittance processors with a comprehensive, electronic check processing solution for accounts receivable conversion (ARC) and truncation of all lockbox checks.