Fraud can happen anywhere in the eCommerce world. It doesn’t matter if you’re running a small online business or are an owner of a retail chain. Technology developing and eCommerce market growth are incentives for fraudsters to find new ways of hacking into the market. It’s hard to estimate the true scale of fraud in business, but it’s a serious issue. Read this post to find out how you can prevent fraud.

The LexisNexis True Cost of Fraud report shows that the average value and volume of fraudulent transactions has risen since 2015. The truth is, it’s unstoppable so merchants should keep in mind that they might face fraudulent activities.

Fraud isn’t only related to monetary loss, but can also harm your reputation and brand image. Online business owners need to prepare for fraudulent activities so they can detect and prevent them. Is it possible?

Fraudulent practices are growing with the increased use of online credit cards and is mostly done against consumers. Fraud comes in many forms such as unauthorized transactions, fake requests for a refund, using the service without paying the due amount, etc.

Fraud is made for personal gain and comes with unauthorized and illegal benefits. It’s almost impossible to prevent fraud when technology is developing so fast. Anyone on the internet can be anonymous and there is no need to be physically present when you authorize payments. There are credentials used to identify users but it doesn’t take a technical expert to realize an identity can be stolen. It’s really about having adequate protection. If it’s done correctly, your payments will be secure and if not, the fraudsters can do harm.

To learn more, see: What is a payment fraud?

While eCommerce business owners need to manage fraud, they also have to face customer trust and loyalty loss. It’s crucial to have a fraud management plan or to choose a payment provider with highly effective anti-fraud tools.

Anti-fraud services such as data analysis have been used for years to detect fraud. It’s time-consuming and needs comprehensive knowledge in finance, economy, law, and more. Fraud activities may be similar, but are rarely identical. We now also have artificial intelligence so data processing can be more advanced.

There are many fraud detecting methods such as data mining, time-series analysis, calculation of statistical parameters and matching algorithms to detect anomalies.

Fraud detection solution comes in a few stages. The first stage is to prevent fraudulent activities, which is connected to risk management. If a potential fraudulent behaviour is identified, it’s time to start the back-office process. The last part of fraud detection is analysing the data to predict new scenarios and fraud methods.

As you can see, the whole process requires highly effective data mining techniques. If you care about your business credibility and customers’ security, fraud management is a must. It comes with several benefits. Some of them are:

• When you offer customers an anti-fraud system, your brand awareness increases and there’s a greater value attributed to the services you’re providing.
• The number of non-identified transactions decrease, which result in lower costs related to credit recovery.
• All the benefits listed come with increased revenue and increased customer retention.

In all, there are many ways merchants can lose customers while trying to catch cyber-thieves. According to a LexisNexis study, top challenges when selling merchandise through online or mobile channels are verification of customer identity, delay in payment confirmation, and confirmation of package delivery.

Cyber-criminals can make a lot of money in the online market so it’s almost impossible to prevent their attempts of stealing money from credit cards. However, there are some warning signs you can focus on to minimize the risk of being hacked. Here’s a list of what you can do to prevent and lower the risk of fraud.

Check your business orders closely. The best way of doing this is to monitor every order before shipping them and it takes time. Pay attention to the shipping address. If it’s different from the billing address or looks weird, you can cancel shipping the order. You can also request the issuing bank to get in touch with the customer. Online thieves often give bad phone numbers that don’t match with credit cards they use to make an order.

Another indicator of fraud is an IP address from outside the country. Of course, this doesn’t always mean an order is connected with fraudulent activities. Be certain before you accuse a customer. If you have any doubts, contact the customer to confirm that they actually ordered the product.

Another thing to watch closely is repeated attempts to order an item or service on the same card.

It’s normal for you to be worried because determining if a customer is fraudulent may cost you a legitimate customer who will never return to buy something from you.

You should always ask for a signature upon delivery. Just to make sure the order was delivered and in good hands.

When selling globally, you need to check orders twice. This is especially true when shipping to Asia or Africa as they are countries with higher instances of fraud. Slow shipping and a lack of shipping options can also be obstacles for customers. The speed of delivery really matters for online shoppers, who are usually impatient and want to receive their order as fast as possible.

eCommerce comes with a 24/7 experience and therefore it’s natural that people may buy online at any time. You should especially monitor late night and early morning orders. This is because fraudsters often make purchases during this time period.

The same can be said with express shipping. It’s one of the common shipping methods chosen by fraudsters because they don’t have to worry about the shipping cost. They also often make costly orders in high quantities.

Strange or “cute” e-mail addresses should set off alarm bells. Again, it doesn’t mean that every ridiculous email address is going to be suspicious. Usually, a person’s e-mail address will match with their name. But when you see something like Iamfraudster@somedomain.com, think twice before shipping the product.

You also need to be careful of the anonymous e-mail services. Thieves are more likely to use this kind of e-mail providers because they don’t give personal information to the police or merchants.

These fraudulent transactions are not easy to detect, so highly effective anti-fraud tools are necessary. There are many companies that specialize in fraud management. If you are a merchant that processes payments on your website, you can provide highly effective anti-fraud protection by choosing the proper payment gateway. You also don’t need to worry that much because the provider takes on the responsibility of preventing fraud.

Don’t forget to update your network security systems in order to ensure that all the sensitive information is safe. You can also encrypt transactions and e-mails with important data for extra security.

You can even go a step further and create a database with fraudsters who make orders at your online store. Moreover, set a network with other merchants in your industry and share the information with each other.

Even though you did your best to protect the purchases, fraudsters were too witty. What now? Don’t panic because that definitely doesn’t help. Then, take the following steps to solve the problem.

Prepare the documentation. Everything connected with the order could be useful, so pull together all the details including the cardholder name, card details, billing address, e-mail, date of order, date it was sent, etc. You also need to find the shipping address. It could be a company physical address or deserted house, but even though you can ask the police to establish an investigation on that location.

Remember I told you to ask for the signature? You can check who signed for the delivery and it could prove essential for the case.

The next step is to inform the local police and go over the address where the product was shipped. It could help, but sometimes the police will not go further in the investigation, especially when it was a low-cost order.

In recent years, the greatest concern with fraudulent transactions comes from mobile devices. This is because many merchants still don’t have effective security management systems. The best solution is to invest in a system that automatically flags suspicious transactions and combines it with multiple fraud mitigation services. Using many solutions together improves your chances of not getting scammed. It’s also good to provide manual reviews to strengthen the verification process.

Do you provide highly effective fraud protection to keep your business safe?

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