In the recent reports online stores have to deal with more than 200000 attacks each month. As the popularity of the of the online shopping increases so does the cybercriminals and unscrupulous consumes to scam online business. before protecting yourself from these frauds, you need to understand what ecommerce fraud is?
To understand this, we have to break down the term, where ecommerce means commercial transaction conducted electronically over internet and fraud means criminal deception intended to make financial or personal gain.
So, ecommerce fraud is a criminal deception made during commercial transaction with the goal of financial or personal gain while effecting the image of merchants. It is also known as payment fraud.
Why Does Ecommerce Fraud take place?
1. Ease
- In this Internet era things have become much easier as compared to past. Before internet fraudsters had to be physically present to the end point to make a fraud and stole the credit card or other valuable information and it was a risky business itself. But today fraudsters have to just visit dark web and buy those stolen credit card number and other valuable information.
2. Anonymity
- Gradually this fraud is becoming famous as the fraudster don’t have the risk of getting hi identity exposed, all he needs is just a computer and internet.
3. Evasion
- The main advantage of the fraudulent is the police department does not make priority to this type of fraud. The reason behind this scenario is either the amount is small, or it is conducted across the border.
Identifying Ecommerce Frauds
1. Inconsistent order data
- Mismatched data, the zip code and city don’t match with the shopper IP address location.
2. Larger than average order
- The order might be larger than the average customers, multiple units of same object in one order and expedited shipping.
3. Unusual location
- Suppose a user always purchase from an IP address of India but suddenly the purchase is made from another country (USA, for example).
4. Multiple shipping addresses
- The user makes multiple orders on one billing address and ships the products to different address.
5. Many transactions in a short timeframe
- Multiple purchasing transaction are made in short amount of time.
6. Strings of orders from a new country
- You are receiving a small or single order from Ghana and then suddenly received multiple orders from that country in a week.
Steps to prevent fraud on your Ecommerce Store.
1. Regularly conduct security audits
• Shopping-cart software and plugins should be up to date.
• Is your SSL certificate working?
• Is your store Payment Card Industry Data Security compliant?
• Are you backing your store data often?
• Are you scanning your website regularly for malware?
2. Regularly monitor your site for suspicious activity
- Monitor accounts and transaction for red flags like mismatched IP address and physical location of user
3. Use HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure)
- It is a secure version of HTTP. It encrypts the data to protect sensitive information.
4. Set limits on purchase.
- Set a limiter that total amount you will accept from one account on a single day.
- The limiter should be set according to orders and revenue trends.
5. Try to imply an anti-fraud solution.
- Rudimentary anti-fraud tools: It uses machine learning algorithms to identify fraud transaction through IP location.
- Mid-level anti-fraud tools: It automatically declines high-risk orders and give protection against new accounts fraud and account takeover protection.
- Top-level anti-fraud tools: It provide a far wider range of protection like loyalty fraud management, policy abuse protection, automatic decisions and manual review of suspicious transaction.