Over the past year, fraud cases increased throughout the travel industry and affected travel agencies at an alarmingly high rate. At ARC, we aim to ensure you have the knowledge necessary to protect yourself from these latest fraud schemes.
Due to these growing fraud concerns and to comply with the new Payment Card Industry (PCI) 4.0 requirements, ARC will require your adoption of Multifactor Authentication (MFA) if provided by your technology provider (e.g., aggregator, GDS). These provisions are countermeasures against social engineering and phishing attacks intended to collect valid credentials from unsuspecting users for fraudulent purposes.
The two ways to satisfy the MFA requirement are:
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Use a combination of two or more authentication factors as the system provider requires.
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Use a Single Sign-on Service (SSO) concurrently with MFA internally in place. With this option, the user gains access through a federated identity management arrangement requiring two or more authentication factors.
These updated security recommendations are to protect you and your airline partners from the growing sophistication of cyber criminals’ attempts to gain unauthorized access to agency ticketing tools.
Please contact your technology providers for any questions relating to their MFA requirements.
What is PCI? The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) version 4.0 is a compliance framework intended for entities that store, process or transmit payment account data, entities accepting or processing payment transactions, and for developers and manufacturers of software and devices used in those transactions. The PCI DSS compliance framework comprises a baseline of technical and operational requirements designed to protect cardholder data.
The message INVALID DOC STATUS is a common error encountered by agents when viewing a list of IAR errors in their sales report. Once you access the transaction, you will see a longer description of that error message: ERROR - Check document current status not valid for exchange/refund.
This message indicates that the listed ticket may not have been settled in IAR or is otherwise ineligible for exchange or refund. Here are two things you can do to verify the document’s status:
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You may use the LO (List Old) functionality on the IAR View Only tab to look up the document and verify whether it has been used in another exchange or refund transaction.
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Check the Document Retrieval Service (DRS) system to verify the status of the document to verify whether it was settled in IAR.
If the document has not been reported or used in a different refund or exchange, you will need to find an alternative ticket to use or settle the new transaction as a straight sale.