Brief Overview on Payment Card Security in New Zealand Henry Hon Director of Cyber Security Operations & Penetration Testing As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, “there was a 62% increase in shoppers over 60 years old. More than 170,000 adult New Zealanders shopped online for the first time during the first six months of 2020.” In this essay, I would like to dig a little bit deeper into the payment card security controls used in New Zealand from a victim’s point of view. Recently, I suffered from a credit card scam, and thought about how this happened and how a similar situation could be prevented in the future. I have a habit of checking my credit card transactions via my bank’s mobile application regularly, the reason being that my payment card issuing bank (which is Bank of New Zealand), will never allow me to set text notifications to my registered mobile number whenever there is any transaction over certain predefined amount. This was a little strange to me back to several years ago when I newly migrated to New Zealand, as I took those instant transaction text notifications for granted previously.