For nearly 20 years, we’ve provided solutions for e-commerce businesses to accept credit cards online. We can imagine what many of them, if not all of them, are saying these days about the prevalence of online fraud, and how it has worsened with every passing year. ‘I didn’t sign up for this when I launched…
Category: Fraud Prevention
How fraudulent merchants disguise their industries to get a merchant account
It is no secret that high risk merchants of many industries often have trouble applying to get a merchant account. To some banks, the risk is not worth the reward. Other banks and payment processors – such as Instabill – feel the opposite. Embracing high risk industries also means embracing the byproducts that come with…
Transaction Laundering: The Reasons Why Fraudsters Do It
For payment service providers, knowing why transaction laundering occurs is important to stopping it. We feel there are three reasons fraudsters turn to transaction laundering: To sell illicit and/or illegal goods, such as drugs To get better rates, both credit card acceptance and processing To lure consumer credit card data As we’re days from holiday…
How an E-Mail Address Can Indicate Credit Card Fraud
It’s no secret that online merchants are in a perpetual battle in mitigating credit card fraud. Rates of fraud are escalating because it is a fast-earning, largely anonymous, easy crime to commit. In fact, there are cybercrime ‘businesses’ and hacking groups all over the world, particularly in the eastern Europe and Asia regions, whose missions…
Credit Card Fraud Detection: Are Merchants Winning or Losing?
E-Commerce and mobile commerce (M-commerce) sales worldwide eclipsed $1.9 trillion in 2016 and are expected to reach $4.0 trillion in the year 2020. That massive amount of growth is sure to bring higher rates of fraud. So what can merchants expect to see in the way of credit card fraud detection innovation? An expert panel…
False positive declines are more damaging than chargebacks
For all of our e-commerce merchant partners, we’re posing a question: What is worse, suffering chargebacks or false positive declines? According to a recent study by the Vesta Corporation and Javelin Strategy & Research, the answer might surprise you: It’s the latter. The fear of suffering fraud is higher than ever. Online merchants have set…
The Fraud Detection Tools You Should Be Using
We recently read the results of Managing Fraud in Remote Payments, an excellent report compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, about the fraud detection tools of choice by U.S. e-commerce merchants. It was no surprise that among 21 tools that the surveyed online merchants use — such as address verification systems, postal…
Cyber Threat Intelligence Sharing: Tell Your Story for Others
Merchants have a tool for fighting fraud and most may not even know it: we call it cyber threat intelligence sharing, a fancy title for sharing your story of a recent cyber attack you may have suffered or prevented. Obviously, there is a war in progress between e-commerce merchants and hackers, especially small business merchants,…
Address Verification System: Finding the Sweet Spot to Prevent Fraud
As the war on fraud wages on, enlisting more fraud controls isn’t always the best course of action. Instances of fraud need to be examined and methods of prevention to be tweaked. It’s a game of cat and mouse: Just when we appear to have a handle on fraud, the miscreants worldwide find another way…
One Way Applying for a Merchant Account Has Changed
If you’re an e-commerce or POS merchant applying for a merchant account, it’s not unusual these days to field a few extra questions about your processing history, bank statements or business plan. Over the last five years, acquiring banks are paying more attention to merchant account applicants – validating who they are and what they…