Good morning. Fraudsters are increasingly using pilfered credit-card numbers and phishing attacks to prey on overwhelmed consumers and banks during the coronavirus pandemic. There has been a big jump in attempted credit- and debit-card fraud since the new coronavirus shut down the U.S. economy this year, according to Fidelity National Information Services Inc., which assists U.S. banks with fraud monitoring. The dollar volume of attempted fraudulent transactions rose 35% in April from a year earlier, FIS said, a trend that appears to be continuing in May.

Most of the fraudulent transactions were caught before they hit cardholders’ accounts, FIS said, but a rise in successful fraud attempts could lead to higher losses for card issuers and, ultimately, higher costs for consumers. “This is going to hit everyone very hard,” said Krista Tedder, head of payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, which advises card issuers on security issues.

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Banks have increased fraud projections for 2020, according to Aite Group, a research and consulting firm. A sharp decline in travel and spending at bricks-and-mortar locations has shifted much of the fraud to the internet at large card issuers including Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Synchrony Financial, according to people familiar with the matter. Fraudsters are employing a number of tactics to dupe unsuspecting consumers and banks.

Compliance teams at companies such as PayPal and Western Union, meanwhile, have been monitoring early indicators of fraudulent activities and incorporating them into their investigation processes. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a U.S. Treasury Department bureau focusing on combating illicit finance, alerted financial institutions to an increase in Covid-19-related scams in a recent advisory.

The Justice Department is closing investigations into three U.S. senators for stocks trades made shortly before the coronavirus market turmoil, but is continuing an investigation into GOP Sen. Richard Burr, according to people familiar with the matter. Prosecutors alerted defense attorneys for Republicans Kelly Loeffler of Georgia and James Inhofe of Oklahoma as well as Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California that they are closing investigations into their trading, the people said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation began the investigations two months ago, as reports emerged that several members of Congress, their spouses or their investment advisers sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock after lawmakers attended closed-door briefings about the threat posed by the pandemic. Some of those trades spared lawmakers as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses as stocks sank by mid-March.

• Ares Management has agreed to pay $1 million to settle allegations that it bought stock in one of its portfolio companies while an Ares employee sat on that company's board and had access to inside information. The Securities and Exchange Commission announced the settlement Tuesday, saying the stock purchases violated the private-equity firm's compliance policies.
   
• President Trump called on House Republicans to reject pending legislation that would renew a set of domestic surveillance powers that lapsed two months ago.

Boeing and Airbus are researching the new coronavirus’s behavior inside jetliners, part of an industry push to curb risks that have brought air traffic to a near standstill. Their work will involve academics, engineers and medical experts expected to examine new measures to prevent disease transmission on airplanes, according to the companies and people involved in their discussions.

The effort to better understand air-travel risks during the pandemic comes as airlines try to reassure passengers that masks and filtered cabin air provide reliable protection from infection. Global air traffic has plunged as governments closed borders and ordered would-be fliers to stay home. Boeing this week is expected to announce about 2,500 voluntary layoffs in the first phase of broader cuts triggered by the coronavirus-driven collapse of global air travel, according to union officials.

Economic and political tension between China and the U.S. has pushed a financial-markets issue into the political mainstream. Legislation passed by the U.S. Senate—and now introduced in the House—would kick Chinese companies off U.S. stock exchanges unless their audits are inspected by U.S. regulators.

No firms would immediately lose their listing under the proposed legislation, but investors worry it will further inflame tensions between Beijing and Washington. Shares in major Chinese companies listed in the U.S. dropped sharply in the days after the Senate passage. With the global economy reeling from the coronavirus, a worsening of the relationship could create more skepticism about the resumption of trade talks and send both U.S. and Chinese shares lower.

“Chinese companies have failed to meet U.S. standards that were agreed upon in writing when their companies were listed,” said Michael Farr, president of money-management firm Farr, Miller & Washington. “The problem is that compliance failures have gone unaddressed and bad behavior has increased.”

Twitter on Tuesday turned down a widower’s request to delete tweets by President Trump floating baseless theories about his wife’s death, but for the first time applied a fact-checking notice to a different unsubstantiated claim the president made on the platform.

The social-media company didn’t explain its decision early in the day not to remove Mr. Trump’s tweets falsely suggesting that former lawmaker and current MSNBC host Joe Scarborough had played a role in the 2001 death of a former congressional aide.

On Tuesday evening, however, a notice appeared on a pair of tweets the president had issued early that morning in which he suggested, without providing evidence, that mail-in ballots would lead to voter fraud. “Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed,” he tweeted.

• Facebook internally studied how it polarizes users and how it might address the resulting harms, but senior executives of the social-media giant largely shelved the basic research, according to previously unreported internal documents and people familiar with the effort, and weakened or blocked efforts to apply its conclusions to Facebook products.

The world’s developed economies saw the largest fall in output since the global financial crisis in the first three months of the year, as governments began to impose lockdowns designed to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus. With lockdowns continuing through April and largely in place in the first half of May, economists expect the second quarter to see a bigger decline in GDP than that recorded in the wake of the global financial crisis.

As reopenings accelerate in the U.S., the Trump administration is examining proposals to provide cash incentives to encourage unemployed Americans to return to work, according to a top economic adviser, as the White House looks to revive the economy. The back to-work bonus is “something we’re looking at very carefully,” Larry Kudlow, the director of the White House National Economic Council, said during an interview on Fox News. And lawmakers are increasingly looking to expand an existing wage subsidy to keep workers on payrolls and help businesses stay afloat.

In Europe, meanwhile, governments are grappling with how to wean companies and workers off the support that has helped stem the widespread unemployment that has been seen in the U.S.

• Hertz Global Holdings paid more than $16 million in retention bonuses to senior managers, including its new chief executive, just days before it filed for bankruptcy.
   
• Aston Martin, the British sports-car company made famous by James Bond, ousted its chief executive in a fresh bid to resuscitate a storied brand that has been on life support.

• Premier and more than a dozen of the health-care systems it works with said Tuesday that they bought a minority stake in medical mask maker Prestige Ameritech and will purchase a portion of all the masks the company produces for the next three years. Premier President Michael Alkire said his organization wants to help the hospitals it represents reduce supply-chain risk. Medical masks, especially those known as N95s that can filter out 95% of very small particles, have been in short supply as the coronavirus pandemic has spread around the world.

• Drugmaker Merck, meanwhile, said it is working on two potential vaccines and an experimental drug against the coronavirus, joining rivals in the frantic search for medicines. Merck, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies by sales, said Tuesday it is acquiring one experimental vaccine as part of the purchase of its Austrian maker, while partnering in the development of a second vaccine candidate and the potential drug.
   
• Race Is On to Create Rapid Covid-19 Tests for the Fall