The New York Times reported that the Taxi Commission is loving the use of credit cards for payment. Last year less than 1 out of 16 cab rides in NYC were paid for with plastic. Now a year later, 1 out of 5 customers are paying with their Visa, Mastercard, American Express, or Discover.

Last November, every single yellow cab in New York City was outfitted with credit card terminals. Now companies are telling employees with business credit cards to hitch a ride on a cab now that they accept plastic, instead of phoning for a more expensive black Lincoln Town Car.  Even with the boom in business customers, taxi use in the city is still down because of the recession. More people are either sharing cab rides or taking other shared public transportation – the shift is bad for taxis, but is good for the environment.

While use of credit cards has slowed here in the United States, many countries overseas are still experiencing double-digit growth in both the total number of credit cards as well as how often they’re used.  A good example of this are credit cards in China. Over 300 million new bank cards (both debit and credit) were issued in 2008. Over 140 million of these were new credit cards – that’s up nearly 60% from previous year. The number of ATMs increased from around 39,000 to 167,000. The increase in POS (point of sale) terminals where users can pay using cards was 660,000 to 1,850,000.  Total transaction volume on cards was $18.6 trillion (in American dollars) and that was a 14% increase over the year before.

In comparison to ours, China’s economy is still booming. The good news? Many of the major credit card companies used there are American.

*The above figures are from the People’s Bank of China.

Do you know who Norm Coleman is? Even if you aren’t a resident of Minnesota, you should recognize the name from heated (and on-going) recount there between him and Al Franken.  Well now Coleman has a whole new problem to deal with; he is being accused of leaking credit card information from over 50,000 of his campaign donors. Basically, the Coleman camp is being accused of storing this credit card info recklessly, in a place on its site that was not secure and easy to find.  If they were a business rather than a political campaign, it is alleged the fashion they stored this data would be illegal. However since they are a polical organization, it doesn’t appear there are any laws on the books that they can be charged with breaking. Of course we don’t know all sides of the story yet, and who (if anyone), did something wrong. But what we do know is thousands of Coleman’s donors have been told to cancel their credit cards.

A massive scam is sweeping major cities across the country, where crooks solicit credit card numbers from unsuspecting people through text messages. Here’s how to avoid this scam, but first, you need to learn how it works:

You receive a text message or phone call that claims the following: your credit card information has jeopardized and in order to re-active your card, you must enter your account number. While it sounds like common sense to not fall for this lie, the message can sound convincing when they reference your specific financial institution. Recently in Kalamazoo, Michigan these fake messages were sent out to cell phone customers in the area. The message claimed it was from Kalamazoo County State Bank – a real bank in the area. Of course not everyone that received this message randomly would be a customer of this bank, but still a small percentage would be. Many these customers figured that the message must be real, because it indeed was their bank. Kalamazoo County Sheriff reported that at least two people fell for this, and money was withdrawn out of their accounts from an ATM in Ireland this past weekend.

Here’s how to protect yourself from credit card phishing over the phone and text message:

1. Never give out ANY personal or account information out to an incoming caller. No financial institution will ever ask for account information over text message.
2. If you feel the caller/sender may be real, then hang up the call, and contact the bank on your own. Call the number on the back of your debit card or credit card and ask them if the message is real. If it is real, handle the matter on that same call that you initiated  – do NOT handle it over an incoming call – there is no way to know who is really on the other line calling you.
3. Report these credit card phishing scams immediately to your financial institution (by calling the number on the back of your card) as well as law enforcement.

Apply these simple common sense steps whenever you receive communication from your bank, it will drastically lower the odds you will ever fall victim to this scam.

This week Myspace, in conjunction with Citi (whose stock is below $1 may I add) issued their very own credit card. The rewards on the Myspace Citi Forward credit card are nothing to jump up and down about – on regular purchases you receive 1 point for every 1 dollar you spend. These points can be redeemed through Myspace for rather unexciting prizes, such as downloads of music on the site. With such a lousy 1% reward structure on regular purchases, and a high 14.25% APR (at time of issue) it makes one wonder why anyone would even bother with the Myspace credit card?

What’s next, the Facebook credit card? Perhaps the Twitter Credit Card where you can redeem points for premium tweets? Hopefully it doesn’t come to this, but only time will tell…