US 8099368

I'll verify the patent's details and current litigation status against live sources before summarizing.

Let me verify the Federal Circuit 2026 docket and current ownership/assignment status.

US 8,099,368 B2 — Analyst Summary

Bibliographic Data

Note on identifiers: I am reporting the assignment entries exactly as recorded, including one that reads "FONWALLET TRANSACTION SOLURTION, INC" (a 2025-02-25 recordation). I have not corrected that spelling.

Ownership chain (from the Google Patents reassignment log, which I did not independently confirm against USPTO assignment records):

• 2010-03-24: inventors → FonWallet Transaction Solutions, Inc.
• 2020-03-06: FonWallet → Authwallet LLC
• 2022-02-08: corrective assignment to Authwallet LLC (reel 052439, frame 0845)
• 2025-02-25: assignment to "FONWALLET TRANSACTION SOLURTION, INC"
• 2025-03-11: assignment to Coulter, Todd Russell, Mr.
• 2025-03-18: assignment by declaration/affidavit to Coulter, Todd Russell
• 2025-07-08: license to SKUXCHANGE, INC. (assignor Coulter, Todd)

Abstract (verbatim)

"A transaction processing service operates as an intermediary between acquirers of financial transaction requests and issuing institutions that process the financial transaction requests. The intermediary service utilizes a customer's mobile device as an out-of-band communication channel to notify a customer of a received financial transaction request. To send the notification, the intermediary service retrieves stored customer information, including an address of the customer's mobile device and a list of payment instruments that can be used to pay for the transaction. Before continuing to process the received financial transaction request, the service may first require the customer to confirm the transaction via the mobile device. The intermediary service retrieves financial account information associated with the customer from issuing institutions, and, if the transaction is confirmed, provides the account information to acquirers in order to allow transactions to be processed."

Independent Claims — Plain Language

The '368 Patent contains independent claim 1 (method) and independent claim 14 (system). (Complaint filings in the 2024 AuthWallet cases assert claims 1–29 of the '368 Patent, so the claim set extends to 29; I could not verify the text of claims 19–29 from the sources retrieved — see Uncertainty.)

Claim 1 — Method in a server (processor + associated storage)

A payment intermediary server performs:

1. Receiving an authorization request from a requester (e.g., an acquirer or issuer), generated by a transaction at a point of purchase, containing a purchaser identifier, a transaction amount, and point-of-purchase information.
2. Authenticating the authorization request.
3. Retrieving customer information keyed to the purchaser identifier: data defining multiple payment instruments, a verification code, and the address of the customer's mobile device.
4. Generating a transaction indication message that includes transaction information and specifies a response that lets the customer select a payment instrument from at least two of the multiple payment instruments.
5. Transmitting that message to the mobile device using the retrieved address.
6. Receiving a customer confirmation message that includes the selected payment instrument.
7. Obtaining customer account information from an issuing institution, where that account information has a first part encrypted under a first encryption method and a second part encrypted under a second encryption method, the methods chosen so that the server can decrypt the first part but cannot decrypt the second part (the "blind intermediary" / pass-through encryption concept — see FIG. 9 and the debit-PIN discussion at col. 3).
8. Providing the account information to the requester upon determining the confirmation message indicates the customer authorized the transaction.

Claim 14 — System

Structurally mirrors claim 1 as apparatus: a processor; a storage component; a requester communication module (receive the initial authorization request with purchaser identifier and purchase details); an authentication module (confirm the request came from a trusted requester); a customer management module (retrieve customer information including mobile-device data and multiple payment instruments); a mobile device communication module (send a transaction notification allowing selection of a payment instrument from at least two instruments, and receive a confirmation message including the selected instrument); and an issuer communication module (obtain account information whose first part the system can decrypt and second part it cannot). The requester communication module then returns the obtained account information to the requester.

Notable dependent claims (verified text)

• Claims 2–3: requester is an acquirer, or is an issuing institution.
• Claim 4: purchaser identifier comprises Track 1 data of an identification card.
• Claim 5: authorization request has the purchaser identifier encrypted under one method and point-of-purchase information under another.
• Claims 6–9: format validation; transaction info chosen from amount and POP identifier; required response determined by transaction amount and/or by POP.
• Claims 10–12: verification-code requirement plus comparison to a stored verification code; approval/rejection response.
• Claim 13: payment instrument selected per a processing rule.
• Claims 15–18: different notification types depending on transaction type or a price threshold; verification-code comparison gating retrieval of account information.

Litigation and CAFC 2026 Status

• Federal Circuit docket 26-1319 is listed on the patent's Google Patents page under "US case filed in Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit," alongside the District Court docket URLs. My searches for "26-1319" returned no results, so I cannot confirm the parties, the appealed judgment, or the issues on that docket from live sources. I am reporting the docket number as listed, without interpretation.
• W.D. Tex. (Midland/Odessa) — AuthWallet, LLC v. CIBC Bank USA, filed March 1, 2024, asserting the '368 Patent (case in the 7:24-cv-0006x family). The court (affirming Magistrate Judge Derek Gilliland's October 3, 2025 report and recommendation) granted the motion to dismiss, holding that the assignment from FonWallet to AuthWallet Illinois is void as a matter of law because the assignee entity did not legally exist at the time, and that AuthWallet Texas therefore lacks standing. The opinion notes the plaintiff's three objections (failure to find ratification; failure to consider ratification; void vs. voidable). A standing-based dismissal is the kind of judgment that could be appealed, but I have no confirmation that 26-1319 arises from this case.
• Other asserted actions (per Stanford NPE database, PatSnap/PACER summaries, and Ramey LLP announcements): AuthWallet, LLC v. Heartland Payment Systems (2:24-cv-00594, E.D. Tex.), v. Total System Services/TSYS (1:24-cv-03547, N.D. Ga.), v. Global Payments (1:24-cv-03100, N.D. Ga.), v. Fiserv (7:24-cv-00063 and 6:23-cv-00145, W.D. Tex.), v. PNC Financial Services Group (7:24-cv-00067, W.D. Tex.), v. Hotels.com (3:22-cv-01778, N.D. Tex.), plus the 6:23-cv-0014x group. Several of these were voluntarily dismissed without prejudice under Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) before responsive pleading, yielding no merits rulings on infringement or validity.
• Related § 101 history: the sister patent US 9,292,852 (from the same family) was held ineligible under Alice in AuthWallet, LLC v. Block, Inc., 602 F. Supp. 3d 620 (S.D.N.Y. 2022), aff'd sub nom. In re AuthWallet, LLC, No. 2022-1842 (Fed. Cir. May 10, 2023). That ruling addressed the '852 Patent, not the '368 Patent.
• PTAB: IPR2021-00005 (Askeladden LLC v. AuthWallet LLC) concerned US 8,280,776 B2, a family member — not the '368 Patent itself.

Uncertainty / Limits of This Analysis

1. CAFC 26-1319: I could not retrieve any record content. Treat the docket number and its linkage to this patent as unverified beyond the Google Patents listing.
2. Claim text for claims 19–29 is not present in the sources I retrieved. The complaint summaries indicate 29 total claims; whether a third independent claim (e.g., a computer-readable medium claim) exists in the issued patent is unconfirmed.
3. Ownership is contested on the record in at least one district court, and the 2025 assignment/license entries (including the SKUXCHANGE, INC. license and the "SOLURTION" spelling) have not been confirmed against USPTO assignment records.
4. Patent term: the 2029-09-10 figure comes from Google Patents' "anticipated expiration" field and assumes 20 years from the 2009-09-10 non-provisional filing; any patent term adjustment or terminal disclaimer is not reflected.
5. I did not obtain a USPTO PatentCenter or CAFC PACER record directly; the bibliographic data above is drawn primarily from the patent text you supplied (Google Patents, fetched 2026-09-24) plus supporting secondary sources.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 8099368. Let me start with targeted searches.

I have good initial data. Let me dig deeper into the specific cases and defendants.

Let me research the earlier 2022 cases, the CAFC appeal, and the CIBC standing decision.

I've hit my research-step limit, so below is what I was able to verify for US Patent 8,099,368 specifically. I've been careful not to conflate it with sibling patents in the same family (e.g., U.S. 9,292,852 / 8,370,265 / 8,280,776), which AuthWallet sometimes asserted alongside it.

Important caveat on primary source: No litigation was exposed on the patent page itself under a per-patent heading other than the aggregated "family litigation" list (Unified Patents data). Because Google Patents aggregates this at the family level, a few of the docket numbers below may involve family members asserted together with the '368 patent rather than the '368 patent alone. Where I could confirm the '368 patent was asserted, I note it.

Litigation involving US 8,099,368 — Plaintiff: AuthWallet, LLC (patent assertion entity; Ramey LLP)

AuthWallet (formerly FonWallet Transaction Solutions, Inc.) ran a single enforcement campaign asserting the '368 patent against banks, payment processors, and hotel/online platforms. Known cases:

Notes and reliability

• Sole campaign: Every identified case is a plaintiff-side infringement action by AuthWallet, LLC. I found no declaratory-judgment actions, and no IPR/PGR challenging the '368 patent specifically (NPE database and the litigation records show no validity challenges recorded for the '368 patent in these cases).
• Do not confuse patents: I encountered search results referencing an "IPR2021-00410" on a different patent ending in "936" (a Fundamental Innovation Systems patent concerning mobile-device connectors). That is not US 8,099,368 and I have excluded it.
• Refiling pattern: The 2023 W.D. Tex. cases (6:23-cv-00140–00146, -00244) largely reappear as 2024 W.D. Tex. cases (7:24-cv-00063–00067), which is consistent with the dismissals-without-prejudice seen in Georgia and the PNC case permitting reassertion.
• Ownership/standing issue: Post-2020 assignments (FonWallet → AuthWallet LLC, 2020-03-06); corrective assignment (2022-02-08); 2025 reassignments back toward FonWallet/COULTER, TODD RUSSELL (note the "SOLURTION" spelling appears literally in the record); and a 2025-07-08 license to SKUXCHANGE, INC. The void-assignment/standing ruling in the CIBC case is the key merits-adjacent development.
• Unverified items: Exact filing dates for the 2024 W.D. Tex. cases, final dispositions of the Fiserv, Cullen/Frost, Woodforest, Amarillo National Bank, CIBC, First Citizens, Heartland, and N.D. Tex./S.D. Tex./N.D. Cal. cases, and the precise district-court source of CAFC No. 26-1319 were not confirmed before I exhausted my search budget. Treat those cells as "not verified" rather than "no litigation."

Sources: Google Patents page for US8099368B2 (incorporating Unified Patents litigation data and Darts-ip family data); Stanford NPE Litigation Database (npe.law.stanford.edu/patent/8099368); Justia Dockets (dockets.justia.com, party search "AuthWallet, LLC"); RPX Insight; PatSnap litigation summaries (citing PACER dockets 6:23-cv-00146, 1:24-cv-03100, 1:24-cv-03547); Thompson Coburn LLP client alert "AuthWallet sues financial transaction industry for patent infringement" (Mar 7, 2023); Ramey LLP firm announcements; and a court order text (signed Dec 4, 2025) reproduced at craincaton.com concerning the CIBC Bank USA standing ruling.

If you need me to continue, I can run additional targeted searches (e.g., for the CAFC 26-1319 docket and the remaining 2024 W.D. Tex. dispositions).

I'll research PTAB activity on US 8,099,368 across the sources available.

PTAB Proceedings — US 8,099,368 ("Intermediary service and method for processing financial transaction data with mobile device confirmation")

Analysis date: 2026-10-01
Canonical source: USPTO Open Data Portal structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (supplied in prompt)
Supplemented by: targeted web searches of public PTAB/CAFC materials

Caveat up front: my supplemental search budget was exhausted after a limited number of queries. I could not query PTAB E2E (PTAB Center) directly, so the negative finding below rests primarily on (a) the ODP structured data supplied to me, and (b) the absence of any IPR/PGR/CBM on the '368 patent surfacing in searches. Treat "zero proceedings" as the well-supported working conclusion, not a mathematically exhaustive one.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 8,099,368: zero (0 IPR, 0 PGR, 0 CBM) — 0 active, 0 claims invalidated, 0 claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution denied — leaving all 29 claims of the '368 patent untested and uncanceled at the PTAB, so no PTAB estoppel or PTAB invalidity holding is available to a defendant; the patent is not "hardened" by PTAB wins, it is simply unexercised, and the fruitful defenses lie elsewhere (standing/ownership, district-court invalidity, and the demonstrated fragility of the shared family specification).

The "hardened" framing would be wrong here, and so would "claims 1–5 are canceled." Neither happened. What the record does show is a patent owner with a documented problem proving it owns the patent, a sibling continuation whose claims were all invalidated, and a well-populated IPR lane against that sibling — a much more useful picture for a defendant than a clean "no PTAB activity" line would suggest.

Proceedings on US 8,099,368

No proceedings to enumerate

The ODP block returns no AIA trial proceedings for US 8,099,368. There is therefore no proceeding number, petitioner, panel, institution decision, Final Written Decision, settlement, or appeal to report for this patent, and I will not manufacture one.

Corroborating signals from the public record:

• The complaint-analysis record for AuthWallet LLC v. Hotels.com, L.P., No. 3:22-cv-01778 (N.D. Tex.) — a '368 assertion — states expressly that the complaint "does not mention any prior litigation, Inter Partes Review (IPR) proceedings, or licensing history related to the patent-in-suit."
• The '368 patent's Google Patents page (https://patents.google.com/patent/US8099368/en) lists a long litigation history but no PTAB trial proceedings, and the 2009-11-06 PCT (WO2010054259A1) family has no post-grant filings surfaced.

Related proceeding in the same patent family (does NOT cover US 8,099,368 — read the scope carefully)

The '368 patent is the parent of a small continuation family, all filed 2010-08-18 off the same disclosure:

• US 8,099,368 (app. 12/557,457) — the patent-in-suit here
• US 8,280,776 (app. 12/859,203)
• US 8,370,265 (app. 12/859,205)
• US 9,292,852 (app. 12/859,213)

At least one of those siblings was IPR'd to judgment.

IPR2021-00005 — Askeladden LLC v. AuthWallet LLC

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Patent challenged: US 8,280,776 B2 (NOT US 8,099,368)
• Filed: 2020-10-01 (petition)
• Status: Final Written Decision — Judgment Determining All Claims Unpatentable, 35 U.S.C. § 318(a)
• Judge panel: Lynne H. Browne, Kevin W. Cherry, Arthur M. Peslak (Browne writing)
• Petition grounds (per the FWD's own table):
  • Claims 1–3, 5, 7–14, 16–23, 25, 27–29 — § 102 anticipation by Hogg
  • Claims 7, 20, 28 — § 103 over Hogg + AAPA
  • Claims 4, 15, 24, 27 — § 103 over Hogg + Giordano
  • Claim 6 — § 103 over Hogg + Heffez
  • Claim 26 — § 103 over Hogg + Wehr
  • Supported by the Declaration of Ivan Zatkovich (Ex. 1002)
• Institution decision: not confirmed in the sources I retrieved (a FWD exists, so trial was instituted). No institution date or reasoning is stated here because I could not verify it — do not rely on an assumed date.
• Final Written Decision: The Board determined "that Petitioner has met its burden of showing, by a preponderance of evidence, that claims 1–29 of the '776 patent are unpatentable." Independent claims 1, 11 and 21 were among the challenged claims; all 29 fell. The panel also rejected every claim-construction position Patent Owner advanced — including its attempt to require that a "processing rule" apply equally to each member of a group of purchaser identifiers, its "location of the purchaser differs from the location of the point of purchase" construction, and its attempt to read an extra timing component into the "time interval" limitation ("we decline to read Patent Owner's additional timing component into the claimed second alternative"). Expert support for the Patent Owner (Mr. Landers) was found unsubstantiated. Public copy: https://bannerwitcoff.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IPR2021-00005.pdf (posted March 2022; exact FWD issuance date not confirmed in my sources).
• Settlement / termination: none — the case ran to a merits FWD with all challenged claims held unpatentable.
• Appeal: not confirmed. I found no Federal Circuit disposition for IPR2021-00005 in the sources retrieved.
• Defensive value: directly relevant to the '368 only as a roadmap, not as estoppel or cancellation. It is powerful context for three reasons: (1) the '776 shares the '368's specification (the FWD's description of the '776 mirrors the '368 abstract almost verbatim), so the disclosure — including the acquirer/intermediary/mobile-device architecture and the "selected payment instrument" flow — was held fully anticipated by a single reference in the hands of a competent petitioner; (2) it establishes that the patent owner litigates the family to a merits loss when pressed, and loses claim-construction fights; (3) it identifies Hogg as a reference the Office had not previously applied to this family. It does not cancel or estop anything as to the '368, whose claims differ (e.g., '368 claim 1's encrypted-first-part/second-part account-information limitation, and the "selection of a payment instrument from at least two of the multiple payment instruments" element asserted in the complaints).

Additional family fact confirmed from the same record: US 8,280,776 expired on 2016-10-04 for failure to pay the 3.5-year maintenance fee, and was only restored by a § 1.378(b) unintentional-delay petition filed 2019-08-07 — i.e., the revival and the March 2020 assignment to AuthWallet bracket the start of this assertion campaign. (Source: prosecution-history exhibit filed in IPR2021-00005.) Whether the '368 patent itself ever lapsed for non-payment is not established by anything I retrieved; the Google Patents record shows it as "Active" with a nominal expiry of 2029-09-10, so do not assume a lapse — verify against USPTO fee records before relying on it.

Strategic summary

Claim status on the '368 patent: 29 claims, all UNTESTED. Zero canceled, zero sustained. Claims 1–29 are what AuthWallet uniformly asserts (see, e.g., the TSYS, Hotels.com, and Cullen/Frost complaints). Because no IPR/PGR was instituted against the '368, there is no § 318 cancellation to point to, no FWD to quote, and no claim-level holding narrowing or destroying any claim. Anyone telling you a claim of the '368 is dead at the PTAB is wrong. The genuinely strong vulnerability on this patent is not patentability before the Board — it is Article III standing and chain of title, and it has already produced a dismissal: in AuthWallet, LLC v. CIBC Bank USA, No. 7:24-cv-00066 (W.D. Tex.), the court held the FonWallet→AuthWallet Illinois assignment void as a matter of law (assignment to a non-existent entity), affirmed the Magistrate Judge's 2025-10-03 report and recommendation, and dismissed for lack of standing; the opening paragraphs of that order document that AuthWallet Texas was not a legal entity until 2021-03-30 and the "corrective" 2022 recordation was unsigned and unnotarized. Current USPTO assignment records through mid-2025 show further churn (FonWallet "SOLURTION" → Coulter → SKUXCHANGE, INC. license). Every defendant should attack title first.

Estoppel landscape: wide open. § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches only to grounds a petitioner "raised or reasonably could have raised" in an instituted IPR/PGR. With no instituted proceeding against the '368, no estoppel bars any ground against this patent for any party, on any art, under §§ 102/103/112. The only estoppel in the family runs to Askeladden (and its privies) as to the '776 patent — irrelevant to the '368. Practically, the constraint on a defendant today is procedural, not estoppel-based: (i) the § 315(b) one-year bar runs from service of an infringement complaint, and AuthWallet's complaints are frequently dismissed within days (e.g., PNC, 6:23-cv-00146, filed 2023-02-22 and closed 2023-03-06 on a with-prejudice agreed dismissal; Hotels/Payne-type exits elsewhere) — but service of a later-dismissed complaint still starts the clock, so calendar it immediately; and (ii) the current USPTO discretionary-denial regime, under which institution rates have collapsed (reported at ~14% in Q4 2025 for first petitions under the October 2025 bifurcated procedure, per BSA's 2026-09-02 letter to House Judiciary), with Fintiv-type parallel-litigation denial and a "settled expectations"/older-patent doctrine being applied aggressively. A 2012-issued patent with a 2008 priority date being asserted in a large parallel Texas campaign is close to the worst-case profile for getting an IPR instituted in 2026. Budget for a strong § 325(d)-defeating merits showing, a Sotera stipulation, and a compelling-merits argument; or litigate invalidity in district court and lean on standing.

Pattern signals. (1) Same petitioner, family-wide: Askeladden LLC filed the '776 IPR and won 29/29 — a defensive-aggregator-style filer operating against the FonWallet/AuthWallet portfolio; I could not confirm the full set of Askeladden filings against the other continuations (8,370,265 / 9,292,852) within my search budget, and I would not assume their number or outcome. (2) Patent owner appeal posture: no PTAB appeal by AuthWallet on the '368 is possible (no proceeding), and I found no confirmed appeal of the '776 FWD. The Google Patents litigation block does list a Federal Circuit case, 26-1319 — I flag this as unverified; it is plausibly an appeal arising from the Texas standing dismissals given the 2026 docket number, but I could not confirm its subject matter and you should not cite it without pulling the docket. (3) Unified Patents is NOT in this chain as a petitioner. The "Unified Patents Litigation Data" strings in the Google Patents record are the attribution for Google's litigation dataset, not evidence of a Unified IPR. Nothing in the record shows Unified Patents or any defensive aggregator has petitioned against the '368. (4) Serial, fast-settling NPE campaign: 2020 (Visa, N.D. Cal.), 2022 (Hotels.com, Omni, S.L.H.), 2023 (Amarillo National, Cullen/Frost, Fiserv, PNC, CIBC), 2024 (Cullen/Frost re-file, Heartland, TSYS, First Citizens) — the volume of short-lived suits, not PTAB filings, is the signature here.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant and the demand letter cites claims 1–29: there is no FWD to link and no canceled claim to quote. Do not represent otherwise. Your opening moves are (1) a Rule 12(b)(1) standing/title challenge built on the AuthWallet v. CIBC Bank USA order (W.D. Tex., No. 7:24-cv-00066) — the same void-assignment theory is transferable against AuthWallet Texas; and (2) an early invalidity position, using the '776 FWD (https://bannerwitcoff.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IPR2021-00005.pdf) as a benchmark for how this family's disclosure reads on prior art and how Patent Owner's constructions fare.
• If you want the PTAB lane, move on the § 315(b) clock now. The one-year bar is measured from service of the complaint, regardless of a later voluntary dismissal. Confirm the operative service date, then file early to blunt Fintiv. Include a Sotera-style stipulation (no district-court reliance on instituted grounds) and, where the art is the same as or substantially the same as the '776 Hogg-based grounds, address § 325(d) head-on: Hogg was not applied by the examiner, which is your best Advanced Bionics Step 1 argument.
• Because there is no active proceeding, no trial-stage milestones exist to track — no institution deadline, no oral hearing, no statutory one-year FWD date. Any such dates you see quoted would relate to a different patent in the family. If you file, the PTAB's statutory FWD deadline is one year from institution (35 U.S.C. § 316(a)(11)).
• Verify, don't assume: (a) pull the PTAB E2E docket for US 8,099,368 and its family at https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/ to confirm the zero count at the claim level; (b) pull CAFC docket 26-1319 on CourtListener before relying on it; (c) check USPTO maintenance-fee records for the '368 patent's fee history (the sibling's 2016 lapse-and-revival is a live issue in this family); and (d) obtain the current, post-2025 assignment chain, since the recorded assignments through 2025-07-08 (Coulter → SKUXCHANGE, INC. license) post-date the Google Patents snapshot and could affect both standing and who has authority to settle.

Bottom line: the '368 patent has never been tested at the PTAB — that is a gap, not a shield. The defensive value a defendant can actually monetize sits in (1) the ownership/standing defect already credited by a W.D. Tex. court, and (2) the demonstrated invalidity and construction losses of the sibling '776 patent built on the same specification.

I'll verify the assignment record against live sources before reconstructing the chain. Let me run several targeted searches.

Let me dig further for reel/frame specifics and correspondent data.

Found rich primary-source material. Let me chase the correspondents, the 2025 transfers, and the original 2009 recording.

I hit the step limit mid-search, so the last three queries (SKUXCHANGE, Gorrichategui, FonWallet corporate history) did not return. I'll flag what that leaves open rather than fill it in.

Ownership Record — US 8,099,368 B2

Verification note up front: I could not open USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov) directly; it does not render to my search tooling. The record below is reconstructed from (a) the Google Patents reassignment log in the patent text you supplied, (b) an actual USPTO Patent Assignment Cover Sheet reproduced as Exhibit 1004 in IPR2021-00005 (a family member's file), and (c) a federal court opinion in AuthWallet, LLC v. CIBC Bank USA (W.D. Tex.) posted at craincaton.com. Items (b) and (c) are primary/near-primary. Reel/frame numbers are confirmed for only one entry — everything else I mark "not retrieved." Do not treat the missing reel/frames as absent; they exist behind a search interface I could not query.

Inventors

Patterns of note:

• Employer is inferred from the inventor-to-FonWallet assignment, not from employment records. I did not verify any employment agreement.
• I found no evidence of mass inventor departure within 12 months of the 2009-09-10 filing. That specific fire-sale precursor is not present.
• The genuinely unusual pattern is at the end of the chain, not the start: named inventor Coulter reacquires the patent in 2025. He executed the 2020 assignment as assignor's signatory for FonWallet, and by 2025-03-11/2025-03-18 he is the assignee. An inventor who signs the divestiture on the company's behalf and then personally receives the asset back five years later is a control-continuity red flag, not a neutral transfer.

Original assignee

FonWallet Transaction Solutions, Inc. — named on the face of the issued patent (also spelled "Fonwallet" in court filings).

• Line of business: mobile payment / transaction-intermediary technology. The specification describes an intermediary service sitting between acquirers and issuers with out-of-band mobile confirmation — consistent with a payments startup, not a diversified operating company.
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Not determined. I found no product, no commercial deployment, and no SEC filing for FonWallet. Its patents were prosecuted by Perkins Coie LLP and it held a five-patent family (8,099,368; 8,244,643; 8,280,776; 8,370,265; 9,292,852). That is a plausible profile for either a failed startup or a pure IP-holding vehicle from inception — I cannot distinguish the two on the record I retrieved, and I will not guess.
• Current status: Unresolved. No bankruptcy record found. What is documented is that FonWallet divested the entire family in March 2020, and then appears again in the 2025 USPTO log as a transferor under the literal name "FONWALLET TRANSACTION SOLURTION, INC" (recorded 2025-02-25). I have not corrected that spelling — but note the entity that surfaces in 2025 is a transferee of the patent (per Google's log), even though the patent had already left FonWallet in 2020. That circularity is unexplained on the record and is one of the two most important open questions here (the other is discussed in the Verdict).

Assignment timeline

Chronological. Reel/frame shown where confirmed; "not retrieved" means I could not query it.

• 2009-11-03 (executed) / recorded 2010-03-24 — Reel not retrieved
  • Conveyance: Assignment (inventors' interest)
  • Assignor: Todd Russell Coulter; Mordechai E. Kaplinsky; Christopher E. Lewis
  • Assignee: FonWallet Transaction Solutions, Inc.
  • Correspondent: Not retrieved.
  • Context: Initial ownership vesting — standard inventor-to-company assignment, ~8 weeks after the Sept 10, 2009 non-provisional filing.

• 2020-03-02 (executed) / not recorded — Reel none
  • Conveyance: Patent Purchase Agreement (unrecorded)
  • Assignor: FonWallet Transaction Solutions, Inc.
  • Assignee: AuthWallet LLC, an Illinois limited liability company
  • Correspondent: n/a — never filed.
  • Context: Portfolio sale to a licensing-only buyer. Never recorded with USPTO; surfaced only in litigation. Per the CIBC opinion the PPA alone did not convey title, and the recorded assignment (below) was executed three days later.

• 2020-03-05 (executed) / recorded 2020-03-06 — Reel not retrieved (USPTO document ID 505954569, later resubmitted 2020-04-20 under cover of a new cover sheet bearing the same docket)
  • Conveyance: Assignment
  • Assignor: FONWALLET TRANSACTION SOLUTIONS, INC. (signed by Todd R. Coulter on FonWallet's behalf; notarized by Eileen J. McEwen)
  • Assignee: AUTHWALLET LLC — 2700 PATRIOT BOULEVARD, GLENVIEW, ILLINOIS 60026
  • Correspondent: MATTHEW M. WAWRZYN (email matt@wawrzynlaw.com), Glenview, IL. This address is the attorney's own office — 2700 Patriot Blvd, Suite 250, Glenview, IL is the recorded address of Wawrzyn & Jarvis LLC / Wawrzyn LLC. Repeat-player flag: Wawrzyn is also AuthWallet's litigation counsel (e.g., AuthWallet, LLC v. Visa Inc., N.D. Cal. 3:20-cv-04121). Assignee's address of record = correspondent's law office.
  • Also on the cover sheet: Submitter CARLOS O. GORRICHATEGUI III, signature /DrCOGIII/, attorney docket 69679-8001, covering 9 properties including Patent 8,099,368. The cover sheet is bizarrely captioned "This document serves as an Oath/Declaration (37 CFR 1.63)" — a recording irregularity.
  • Context: Transfer-to-asserter. Court found the named assignee did not legally exist until May 5, 2020 — i.e., the assignment was executed to a non-existent entity.

• 2022-02-08 — Reel 052439/0845 (the only reel/frame I could confirm; see caveat)
  • Conveyance: Corrective Assignment ("to correct the receiving party data previously recorded")
  • Assignor: FONWALLET TRANSACTION SOLUTIONS, INC.
  • Assignee: AUTHWALLET LLC
  • Correspondent: Per the CIBC opinion, created by Carlos O. Gorrichategui, bearing the initials "COG" — second appearance of Gorrichategui in this chain. Opinion adds it was not signed by Coulter and not notarized, backdated to 2020-03-03, and swapped the assignee's state from "Illinois" to "Texas."
  • Context: Curative/clean-up filing — and per the trial court it failed. The Texas entity did not exist until 2021-03-30, so the correction re-pointed the asset at a second non-existent entity.
  • ⚠️ Contradiction to flag: Google Patents labels this entry as correcting data "previously recorded on reel 052439 frame 0845." The CIBC opinion dates the original 2020 assignment to 2020-03-06 and the corrective to 2022-02-08. I cannot determine from available sources whether 052439/0845 is the 2020 record being corrected or the 2022 correcting record. Your prior section attributed 052439/0845 to the 2022-02-08 corrective entry; that is consistent with an alternative reading but is not certain. Treat the frame as unallocated.

• 2025-02-25 — Reel not retrieved
  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignors' interest
  • Assignor: FONWALLET TRANSACTION SOLUTIONS, INC.
  • Assignee: FONWALLET TRANSACTION SOLURTION, INC (spelling reproduced literally; not corrected)
  • Correspondent: Not retrieved.
  • Context: Unexplained re-transfer to a FonWallet-named entity five years after FonWallet divested the family. Internally inconsistent with the 2020 recordings unless a prior link was voided or unwound — which the CIBC court in fact held. Treat this as chain-repair or forum/standing engineering, not a conventional acquisition.

• 2025-03-11 — Reel not retrieved
  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignors' interest
  • Assignor: FONWALLET TRANSACTION SOLURTION, INC
  • Assignee: COULTER, TODD RUSSELL, MR.
  • Correspondent: Not retrieved.
  • Context: Transfer-to-asserter/individual. Named inventor reacquires personally.

• 2025-03-18 — Reel not retrieved
  • Conveyance: Assignment by Declaration/Affidavit
  • Assignor: COULTER, TODD RUSSELL
  • Assignee: COULTER, TODD RUSSELL
  • Correspondent: Not retrieved.
  • Context: Declaratory/curative instrument used to perfect title in an individual — a seven-day follow-on to the 2025-03-11 transfer. Declaration-form conveyances typically signal a missing, defective, or contested paper link.

• 2025-07-08 — Reel not retrieved
  • Conveyance: License (not an assignment)
  • Assignor: COULTER, TODD
  • Assignee: SKUXCHANGE, INC.
  • Correspondent: Not retrieved.
  • Context: Monetization. A license recorded to a third party by the individual owner. Whether this is an exclusive license is material — an exclusive license of all substantial rights can strip the licensor of standing, and would matter to the pending CAFC matter. I could not retrieve the instrument.

Later litigation/regulatory events for context (not assignments): first suits asserting the '368 Patent filed Feb 2023 (the 6:23-cv-0014x W.D. Tex. group); CIBC action filed 2024-03-01 and dismissed for lack of standing Oct 2025; Federal Circuit docket 26-1319 listed on the patent page.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 8099368
    2008 : Provisional filed Nov 8
    2009 : Non-provisional filed Sep 10
         : Inventors assign to FonWallet Nov 3
    2010 : Assignment recorded Mar 24
    2012 : Patent issued Jan 17
    2020 : FonWallet to AuthWallet Illinois Mar 5
         : Recorded Mar 6
    2022 : Corrective assignment recorded Feb 8
    2023 : First suits asserting 368 filed
    2025 : Transfer to FonWallet SOLURTION Feb 25
         : Transfer to Coulter Mar 11
         : Declaration of assignment Mar 18
         : License to SKUXCHANGE Jul 8
    2026 : CAFC appeal docket 26-1319

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — PRESENT (strong).
Transfer from FonWallet to AuthWallet LLC, a licensing-only entity whose address of record is its own attorney's office (2700 Patriot Blvd., Glenview, IL 60026 — the Wawrzyn firm address, per the 2020 cover sheet and the Wawrzyn firm's own litigation letterhead). A federal court then held the assignee did not legally exist until May 5, 2020, rendering the instrument void as a matter of law — i.e., a paper entity that was not even a paper entity yet. That is concrete evidence, not name-based inference. The 2022 corrective attempt re-pointed the asset at a second non-existent entity (AuthWallet Texas, formed 2021-03-30).

2. Known asserter in the chain — PRESENT.
AuthWallet, LLC is a documented high-frequency patent plaintiff (Unified Patents litigation entries are linked on the patent's own Google Patents page; an RPX litigation document for AuthWallet appears at insight.rpxcorp.com/litigation_documents/13201666; PatSnap characterizes it as a "fintech patent holding entity"). It does not appear on the legacy lists in your prompt (Acacia, Marathon, IV, Wi-LAN, etc.), so this is a directory-surfaced high-frequency asserter, not a legacy NPE roll-up member. Recording: 2020-03-06 (Assignee AUTHWALLET LLC) and 2022-02-08 (Reel 052439/0845 per the caveat above).

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — PRESENT.
Two recurring names, both verified:

• Matthew M. Wawrzyn (Wawrzyn & Jarvis LLC / Wawrzyn LLC, 2700 Patriot Blvd. Suite 250, Glenview IL) — correspondent of record on the 2020-03-05/06 assignment, and simultaneously AuthWallet's litigator in multiple suits. Recurrence across roles (recording agent and assertion counsel) is the classic tell.
• Carlos O. Gorrichategui III — submitter on the 2020 cover sheet (doc ID 505954569) and the person the CIBC court found created and initialed ("COG") the 2022 corrective assignment. He appears twice on the two recordings that the court scrutinized. His capacity (attorney vs. in-house/IP administrator) is unconfirmed in my sources.

4. Cascading transfers — PRESENT (dense 2025 cluster).
Chained transfers 2020 → 2022 → 2025-02-25 → 2025-03-11 → 2025-03-18 → 2025-07-08. Four separate recordings in under five months in 2025, ending in an individual owner plus a summary license to SKUXCHANGE, Inc. Whether the 2025 assignees share a correspondent address is unverified — I could not retrieve correspondents for the 2025 entries.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT (for the classic 6-month window).
The 2020 assignment was recorded ~35 months before the first '368 suit (Feb 2023). That is far outside the 6-month window that normally signals venue/standing engineering. However, note the inverse: the 2025-03-11 and 2025-03-18 transfers to Coulter occurred while the CIBC suit was pending (filed 2024-03-01, decided Oct 2025), i.e., mid-litigation title reconstruction triggered by a standing challenge. That is a distinct and arguably worse pattern than a pre-filing transfer, but it does not match this signal's definition, so I score the signal as written.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT.
No Chapter 7/11 proceeding, stalking-horse sale, or docket reference found for FonWallet. I looked; nothing surfaced. The 2020 divestiture is documented as a Patent Purchase Agreement, not a bankruptcy sale.

7. Privateering — UNCLEAR.
The structure is suggestive: an original assignee (FonWallet) conveys to a licensing LLC; a named inventor signs for the assignor and later takes the patent back personally; the assertion entity litigates against large payment processors; and the license to SKUXCHANGE, Inc. suggests third-party monetization. But privateering requires evidence that an operating company benefits from the NPE's assertions against its competitors — typically in an SEC filing or investigative coverage. FonWallet is not a public filer in anything I found, so I cannot make this call. Scored unclear, not present.

8. Defensive aggregator — NOT PRESENT.
The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates at an individual (Coulter, 2025-03) plus a license to SKUXCHANGE, Inc. (2025-07). The patent has not been neutralized.

Verdict

NPE — high confidence.

Two or more strong signals are documented, several of them from a federal court opinion rather than inference: (i) shell-entity transfer — the 2020-03-05 assignment to AuthWallet LLC recorded a receiving party at its own litigator's office address (2700 Patriot Blvd., Glenview IL) that did not legally exist until May 5, 2020, held void in AuthWallet, LLC v. CIBC Bank USA; (ii) known high-frequency asserter — AuthWallet, LLC is a Unified Patents- and RPX-surfaced serial plaintiff; (iii) repeat correspondent — Matthew M. Wawrzyn is on the assignment cover sheet and on AuthWallet's litigation papers, with Carlos O. Gorrichategui III appearing on both the 2020 submission and the court-criticized 2022 corrective (Reel 052439/0845, per the caveat); and (iv) cascading transfers — four recordings in the five months from 2025-02-25 to 2025-07-08, ending at an individual and a license.

Two caveats that could cut the other way. First, the 2025-02-25 transfer back to a "FonWallet Transaction SOLURTION, Inc." entity is unexplained and, standing alone, is inconsistent with an orderly NPE chain — it looks like chain repair after the void-assignment ruling. Second, I could not retrieve the 2025 correspondents or the SKUXCHANGE license terms; if that license is exclusive as to all substantial rights, the current standing picture changes materially and is directly relevant to CAFC docket 26-1319. Independent verification of reel/frame and correspondence data for the 2025 entries is the highest-value next step.

Verify at: USPTO Assignment Center and the mirrored index at assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html — search property number 8099368. Property 12/557,457 and patents 8,244,643 / 8,280,776 / 8,370,265 / 9,292,852 are recorded on the same cover sheets (the 2020 recording covered 9 properties), so pulling the family will recover the reel/frames I could not.

I'll research the prior-art citations for US 8,099,368. Let me run several searches in parallel.

Let me dig into the actual citation tables and the patent's front-page references.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 8,099,368 B2

Important threshold note on what I could verify

I was unable to retrieve the face-of-patent "References Cited" table (the examiner-cited U.S. patent documents, foreign documents, and NPL) for US 8,099,368 B2 within this search session. USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter and the Google Patents "Citations" tab both render that table dynamically, and my queries returned the patent's description, its forward citations, and litigation records — not the front-page back-citation list.

I will not fabricate a citation list. Below I give you (1) the identifiers and family/related documents that are directly verifiable from the record, (2) the forward citations I confirmed, correctly labeled as forward citations rather than § 102 art, and (3) the field-level prior art that is most likely to have been cited or that is most probative — each flagged with its verification status. To obtain the literal examiner citation list, the authoritative sources are the USPTO PatentCenter "References Cited" / IFW "Patent Citing References" for application 12/557,457 and the printed front page of the patent (column 1).

1. The reference itself (confirmed)

Governing law: with a 2008-11-08 priority date and 2009-09-10 filing, the '368 is a pre-AIA patent. Anticipation therefore runs under pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102(a), (b), (e), and (g). Of these, § 102(e) (prior U.S. patents/publications with earlier effective filing dates) and § 102(b) (printed publications and patents more than one year before 2008-11-08) do the heavy lifting for this art area. Section 102(e) art matters a great deal here because so much of the electronic-wallet / mobile-payment art was filed in the 2005–2008 window and published but not yet issued.

2. Same-family / related documents (not § 102 art against the '368, but you will see them in the citation forest)

These appear in the Google Patents "Priority to / Applications Claiming Priority" tables and in the reassignment log. They are common-priority family members and cross-referenced applications — they are not prior art, but any § 102 analysis of the '368 must account for them because § 102(e) commonly reaches sibling applications filed at the same time.

Consistent with the prior section of this analysis: the '852 sibling was held § 101-ineligible in AuthWallet, LLC v. Block, Inc., 602 F. Supp. 3d 620 (S.D.N.Y. 2022), aff'd In re AuthWallet, No. 2022-1842 (Fed. Cir. May 10, 2023). That is a § 101 ruling on a different patent, not § 102 art against the '368.

3. Forward citations (documents citing the '368) — verified

These are not § 102 prior art against the '368 (they post-date it) but they are what most "citation" searches surface, and they are useful because each one maps the '368's disclosure into a later claim. Flagging so you don't mis-classify them.

4. Field-level prior art most likely to bear on the '368's independent claims

Because I could not pull the literal examiner list, I give you the following as the prior-art families that matter most for the '368's claim 1 / claim 14 limitations. Each entry states what is verified and what is my analyst judgment. Do not treat the § 102 mapping below as an examiner-confirmed rejection — it is a reasoned hypothesis to be run against the actual claim text.

The '368 claim 1 has eight steps; the two steps that make it hard to anticipate are (a) selection of a payment instrument from ≥2 instruments at the mobile device via the out-of-band message, and (b) the split-encryption "blind intermediary" limitation ("first part encrypted under a first encryption method and a second part under a second encryption method such that the server can decrypt the first part but cannot decrypt the second part"). Prior art that hits (a) but not (b), or vice-versa, will support § 103 combinations rather than pure § 102 anticipation of claim 1.

4.1 Mobile-device confirmation of a card transaction (out-of-band) — the core concept

• The "confirm the charge on your phone" concept was commercially and patent-literarily well-populated by 2007–2008. The classic references in this space are the Visa/MasterCard "mobile alert / cardholder notification" families and the Boku/Zong, Obopay, and mFoundry filings.
• Verification status: I did not verify a specific one of these as an examiner citation on the '368 face. Treat as candidate art requiring a claim-chart.

4.2 Payment-instrument selection at the point of interaction (the "one token, many cards / dynamic card selection" concept)

• The '368's § 102 exposure here is significant because number-discovery and payment-instrument-selection patents were numerous pre-2008. Representative families: the "virtual card number / dynamic card number" art (e.g., the Orbis/ US 6,636,833 "credit card system and method" family by Flitcroft & O'Donnell, priority 1999), and the "multi-account" or "private label" selection art.
• Analyst judgment (unverified as cited): the Flitcroft/Orbis US 6,636,833 / 7,136,835 family is the single most-cited prior-art family in "one card number maps to many underlying accounts" disputes and would squarely hit the "at least two payment instruments" and "information request to issuing institution" concepts, though not the mobile-confirmation step. On the record I retrieved, I cannot confirm either was cited against the '368.

4.3 Split-encryption / pass-through-blind intermediary

• This is the most distinctive limitation of claim 1 and the one least likely to be anticipated. The closest analog art is the network-tokenization / secure-element / encrypt-for-designated-recipient art, e.g., EMVCo-style token provisioning disclosures (post-2013, therefore not § 102 art) and earlier "transfer of encrypted PIN blocks / DUKPT / triple-DES PIN translation" disclosures used for online debit ("PIN-less debit" / "PIN debit on the internet") — which the '368 specification itself invokes in its Background discussion of Track 2 data and debit PIN handling. Those PIN-block translation references predate 2008-11-08 and are the most plausible § 102(e)/§ 102(b) hits on the encryption limitation.

4.4 Point-of-sale and acquirer-routing art

• The "acquirer recognizes the BIN range and routes to a third party" concept in the '368's FIG. 7 / claim 2–3 is old art in itself (BIN routing is decades old). It will not defeat claim 1 alone but is useful for § 103.

5. § 102 mapping — how I would frame it (with explicit confidence levels)

Bottom line: on my verification, no single reference I could confirm anticipates claim 1 or claim 14 in full, because of the combination of (i) mobile-device selection among multiple payment instruments and (ii) split-encryption blind intermediary. The realistic litigation posture for the '368 is § 103 (two- or three-reference combinations), which is consistent with the observed fact that in the W.D. Tex. actions the validity of the '368 was never adjudicated — e.g., in AuthWallet, LLC v. PNC Financial Services Group, No. 6:23-cv-00146, the case was closed in 12 days via a Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) voluntary dismissal with no answer, no claim construction, and no IPR (PatSnap/PACER docket summary, https://www.patsnap.com/resources/blog/litigation/authwallet-v-pnc-financial-mobile-payment-patent-dismissed-patsnap/).

6. What I could not verify (stated explicitly, per your strict rules)

1. The literal examiner-cited reference list on the '368 front page — not retrieved. Do not attribute any specific patent number to the '368's "References Cited" on the basis of this memo.
2. Whether any specific reference was cited during prosecution of 12/557,457 — unconfirmed. The USPTO IFW / PatentCenter "Patent Citing References" record is the only authoritative source.
3. The identity of the "US case filed in Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, case 26-1319" — carried forward from the prior section as unverified.
4. Whether any IPR/PGR was ever filed against the '368 — no evidence found; the only family IPR surfaced was IPR2021-00005 (Askeladden LLC v. AuthWallet LLC) involving US 8,280,776 B2, not the '368.

Recommended next step: pull the '368's front page (column 1) and USPTO PatentCenter IFW "Patent Citing References" for application 12/557,457; that yields the exact § 102 reference set. If you supply that list, I will produce the full reference-by-reference table (citation, publication/filing date, description, and the specific claim(s) the reference potentially anticipates) in the format you requested.

I'll research the prior art landscape for this patent before building the §103 analysis. Note: the message references "the Prior Art section of this page," but no prior-art section was actually included in what you provided — I'll flag that below and reconstruct the relevant art from the patent's own citations and live searches.

Let me dig into the specific claim elements — particularly the "blind intermediary" two-part encryption and single-token/multiple-instrument selection.

Obviousness Analysis — US 8,099,368 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

I. Scope, evidence base, and an important caveat

The instruction directed me to "use the results from the Prior Art section of this page," but no Prior Art section was supplied in the material I received. The only previously generated sections provided were the Patent summary and the Litigation summary. I therefore reconstructed the prior-art landscape from (a) the '368 specification itself, (b) its pre-grant publication US 2010/0121767 A1, and (c) live searches. If a curated Prior Art list was intended to be the authoritative input, this analysis should be re-run against that list, because my combinations below are built from references I identified independently rather than from a supplied set.

Two of my searches were productive; a third (for the '368's own front-page "References Cited" list) hit the research-step limit and returned nothing. I therefore cannot state which references the examiner actually cited against the '368 during prosecution, and I flag that as a genuine gap.

A key legal note on timing: the '368 has a priority date of November 8, 2008 and was filed September 10, 2009, so pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. §§ 102/103 govern. Prior art must therefore predate November 8, 2008 (or qualify under § 102(e)/(f)/(g)).

II. Person of Ordinary Skill in the Art (POSITA)

A POSITA here would hold a bachelor's degree in computer science, electrical engineering, or a finance-adjacent field, or equivalent experience, plus roughly 3–5 years working with electronic payment systems. That person would be familiar with: the four-party payment model (cardholder / merchant / acquirer / issuing institution plus the payment association); magnetic-stripe Track 1 and Track 2 data; mobile messaging channels (SMS, XMPP, WAP push, IVR); and the cryptography then in use for payments — symmetric and asymmetric encryption, digital signatures, and the SET (Secure Electronic Transaction) protocol, whose dual-signature design was public and heavily documented by the late 1990s.

Notably, the '368 specification itself treats much of the claim-1 machinery as routine: authentication via "digital signature ... or ... a shared encryption key" is described as authentication "using methods well known in the art." That admission helps the obviousness case.

III. Claim 1 — element-by-element mapping

Claim 1 is a method performed by a payment-intermediary server. The core elements and the art that maps to them:

The only element that is not directly and cleanly met by a single reference is (7), the two-part / "blind intermediary" encryption. I address that below and identify what I consider the weakest link in the intended combination.

IV. Primary combination (the strongest § 103 case)

Combination A — Rable (US 7,331,518 B2) + Flitcroft/Orbis (US 6,636,833 B1; US 7,567,934 B2) + Split-SET (WO 00/63854 / EP 1 171 849 B1)

What each reference contributes

• US 7,331,518 B2 (Rable), issued February 19, 2008 — pre-AIA § 102(b) art (more than one year before the Sep. 10, 2009 filing). Discloses: enrolling an account holder; storing account information and mobile contact information (cell phone number); on a transaction, sending an automated "request confirmation" message (e.g., SMS) to the account holder's phone; require-able responses that vary with a threshold ("any requested transaction over $100.00 ... should be personally confirmed"); entry of "out-of-wallet"/"in-wallet" data as an added layer; a Transaction Confirmation Server that receives transaction details from the merchant and returns an approve/deny decision; and a "designated transaction approver" who may be someone other than the account holder.
• Flitcroft/Orbis family — pre-AIA art (US 6,636,833 B1 issued Oct. 21, 2003 → § 102(b); US 7,567,934 B2 filed Jun. 4, 2002 → § 102(e)). Discloses: a central server issuing an identifier that is not the customer's real account number; storing a mapping to one or more underlying accounts; a customer holding multiple accounts and selecting among them; rules/limits (merchant, amount, geography, time); remapping the identifier to the master account number before forwarding the authorization request into the existing network; and delivery of numbers to "a radio unit (such as a portable telephone)".
• Split-SET (WO 00/63854 / EP 1 171 849 B1) — pre-AIA § 102(b) art (published 2000). Discloses an intermediary server sitting between a mobile station and a network facility, and the use of the SET dual signature so that order information and payment information are carried in forms readable by different parties, with the credit-card information transported "transparently" through an intermediate party that cannot read it.

Motivation to combine. All three sit in the same field (electronic payment authorization, G06Q 20/40), address the same two problems that the '368's own Background identifies — (i) fraud that consumers otherwise detect only by reviewing a statement, and (ii) the inconvenience of "managing multiple payment instruments" — and operate on the same existing four-party infrastructure without requiring merchant-side changes. Under KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), combining Rable's out-of-band confirmation channel with Flitcroft's single-identifier/multiple-account remapping is a predictable use of known elements, each performing its own known function: Rable adds an identity-confirmation channel; Flitcroft supplies the payment instrument to be confirmed and the account-swap mechanism. A POSITA seeking to let a cardholder carry one token while choosing among several funding sources, and to confirm the transaction out-of-band, would naturally arrive at the claimed arrangement and would have a reasonable expectation of success (both are software changes to an existing authorization message flow).

Result: Combination A renders claim 1 obvious, with element (7) supplied by Split-SET/SET.

V. Alternative / secondary combinations

Combination B — Horie (JP 2002-133100) or Kobayashi (JP 2001-306806) + Flitcroft + SET/Split-SET. Horie discloses a server ("information processing company server") that intercepts a card-payment authorization flowing between a card-authentication host and the card network and pushes a notification to the user's mobile phone via the carrier host, with the notification continuing until acknowledged. This is structurally closer to the '368's "intermediary between acquirer and issuer" architecture than Rable (which is merchant-triggered). Add Flitcroft for multi-instrument storage/selection and SET for the split encryption. Motivation: same as Combination A, plus Horie/Kobayashi's express objective of "detect[ing] card fraud" through prompt notification.

Combination C — Flitcroft + Rable + EP 1 050 025 A2. EP 1 050 025 A2 discloses an "intermediation server" that receives a transaction identifier, validates a transaction-authentication code delivered to the customer's mobile phone, and delivers a receipt. This supplies the intermediary role plus mobile-code confirmation and supports dependent claims 10–12 (verification-code comparison against a stored code).

Combination D — any of the above + CA 2 671 848 (Taber) / US 8,201,938 (Rhee) / US 7,524,052 (Esses). These were cited in a related PCT search report as bearing on claims 1–5 and 19–21 (i.e., the method/system core). I retrieved them only as citations, not full text, so I flag them as candidate secondary references to be verified rather than as confirmed disclosures.

A caution on a near-contemporaneous reference: US 8,245,044 ("Payment transaction processing using out of band authentication") claims priority to a provisional filed November 14, 2008 — six days after the '368's November 8, 2008 priority date. It is therefore not prior art to the '368. I mention it only because it demonstrates how crowded this space was in late 2008; it should not be cited as § 102/103 art against the '368.

VI. Independent claim 14 (system)

Claim 14 is the apparatus mirror of claim 1, recited as modules (requester communication module, authentication module, customer management module, mobile-device communication module, issuer communication module, storage component). Each module corresponds to a function already mapped above; the modules are conventional server components. Under KSR, "if a claimed invention ... implement[s] a known [process] in a known way," the apparatus claim adds nothing patentable over the method. Combination A (or C, for the intermediary server architecture) renders claim 14 obvious for the same reasons.

VII. Dependent claims

The dependent claims are, on the whole, weaker than claim 1 because they recite well-documented features (thresholds, stored PIN/code comparison, rule-based instrument selection) that the primary references disclose nearly verbatim.

VIII. The weakest link, and the counterarguments

1. Two-part / "blind intermediary" encryption (claim 1 element 7) is the crux. A patentee would argue that neither Rable (which involves no account-data pass-through encryption) nor Flitcroft (which remaps numbers but does not describe two differently-keyed ciphertext parts that the intermediary can only partly decrypt) discloses this element, and that SET dual signatures are signature objects rather than "a first part encrypted under a first encryption method and a second part under a second encryption method." The counter is that Split-SET (WO 00/63854 / EP 1 171 849 B1) expressly encrypts the payment instruction under a symmetric key and the credit-card information under the authentication instance's public key so that an intervening server carries the latter "transparently without giving him the opportunity to have access to the information" — i.e., a first part the intermediary can read and a second part it cannot. The combination thus covers element 7, but this is where an infringement/validity fight would center, and the mapping should be verified against the full text of the Split-SET specification rather than the excerpts I retrieved.

2. Missing prosecution record. I could not retrieve the '368's front-page "References Cited," so I cannot assess what the examiner did or did not consider, or whether a § 103 rejection was made and overcome with evidence of nonobviousness. Any secondary-considerations (objective indicia) argument cannot be evaluated on the present record.

3. The § 101 overlay. Though outside the § 103 question, this family has an adverse eligibility history: US 9,292,852 (a sibling from the same family) was held ineligible under Alice in AuthWallet, LLC v. Block, Inc., 602 F. Supp. 3d 620 (S.D.N.Y. 2022), aff'd In re AuthWallet, LLC, No. 2022-1842 (Fed. Cir. May 10, 2023). That is a different patent and a different statute, but a defendant would likely pair a § 103 challenge with § 101, and the § 103 analysis above should be read alongside it.

4. Assignment/standing noise does not bear on obviousness. The ownership disputes recorded on the '368's family page (including the literal "FONWALLET TRANSACTION SOLURTION, INC" spelling and the void-assignment finding in AuthWallet, LLC v. CIBC Bank USA) affect who may sue, not whether the claims are obvious. I note it only to avoid conflating the two issues.

IX. Bottom line

• Claim 1 and claim 14 are, in my assessment, the most vulnerable and are rendered obvious by Rable (US 7,331,518 B2) in view of the Flitcroft/Orbis CPN family (US 6,636,833 B1; US 7,567,934 B2) and SET/Split-SET (WO 00/63854; EP 1 171 849 B1), with the motivation supplied by the two problems the '368 itself acknowledges (fraud detection and multi-instrument convenience) and by KSR's predictable-combination rationale.
• The dependent claims (2–13, 15–18) are stronger targets than the independent claims, because they recite features (amount-based confirmation thresholds, stored-code comparison, rule-based instrument selection, Track 1 data) that the primary references disclose nearly verbatim.
• The single hardest element to prove is the two-part encryption of claim 1(7); Split-SET is the best available mapping, but my source for it is excerpted, so verify against the full specification before relying on it in a petition or opinion.

Sources

• US 7,331,518 B2 (Rable), "Transaction processing systems and methods" — Google Patents and Justia (published/issued Feb. 19, 2008); also cited in the file history/references of US 8,255,323 B1 (Casey et al.).
• Flitcroft/Orbis CPN family — US 6,636,833 B1, US 7,567,934 B2, US 7,895,122 B1 (Orbis Patents Ltd.); Justia inventor listing for Daniel Ian Flitcroft; uspto.report/patent/grant/6636833.
• SET dual-signature / Split-SET — WO 00/63854 A1, EP 1 171 849 B1, published SET literature (University of Johannesburg thesis excerpt; CUHK lecture notes on SET data visibility).
• US 8,245,044 / US 2012/0271768 A1, "Payment transaction processing using out of band authentication" (priority Nov. 14, 2008 — after the '368 priority date; noted, not relied upon).
• JP 2002-133100 (Horie) and JP 2001-306806 (Kobayashi) as described in a PTAB petition excerpt (card-usage notification to a mobile phone) — retrieved via ptacts.uspto.gov.
• EP 1 050 025 A2, "Procédé de transmission d'information et serveur le mettant en œuvre" (intermediation server + mobile-delivered authentication code).
• US 2010/0121767 A1 (the '368's pre-grant publication) and the '368 specification as supplied.

Verification needed before reliance: (i) the '368's actual front-page "References Cited"; (ii) full text of WO 00/63854 / EP 1 171 849 B1 for claim 1(7); (iii) full text of CA 2 671 848, US 8,201,938, and US 7,524,052, which I retrieved only as citation entries.