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Just like law-abiding consumers, criminals hope to score good deals during the holiday shopping season. And luxury items and business services, such as hosting plans and search engine optimization, top their lists, finds an analysis by Forter, a San Francisco-based fraud-prevention specialist.
In a report released on Monday, Forter analyzed approximately 3 million e-commerce transactions from the past six months to determine which products and services would be coveted by criminals during Cyber Monday, the online-shopping day following Thanksgiving.
As might be expected, items like Rolex watches, Apple Inc. laptops, and gift cards were popular. They tend to be more easily resold, says Bill Zielke, Forter chief marketing officer.
But other products, such as hosting services, Web-site design, and search-engine optimization (SEO) services, also topped criminal wish lists. This indicates that criminals want tools to help legitimize their efforts, Zielke says. “It’s a way to make themselves look more realistic,” he tells Digital Transactions News. “They create false Web sites and buy SEO to make their sites look more legitimate.”
Most retailers and business-to-business companies use a multilayered approach to minimize their potential chargebacks from transactions made with fraudulent credit and debit cards. Zielke says Forter has technology that can analyze a shopper’s behavior on a Web site prior to the checkout process to determine the likelihood of ill intent. “Fraudsters don’t shop like good customers,” he says. The technology can identify a fraudster before they even reach checkout about 80% of the time, he says.
Another approach is to use third-party data, such as a consumer’s social-media account, to further verify the shopper’s identity. Forter can analyze that in real time, Zielke says.
Such capability is vital for many merchants. “Using Facebook or Gmail identities to increase assurance of a customer’s legitimacy can provide some protection for merchants concerned about payments fraud for online purchases,” says Kyle Marchini, a research specialist on fraud and security, at payments-research firm Javelin Strategy & Research.
“Both MasterCard and Visa accept the email address of a registered customer as evidence in chargeback disputes around online purchases, but it is most powerful when combined with other indications of legitimacy,” Marchini says. “For both fraud-prevention and chargeback disputes, this kind of identity verification is especially valuable when the merchant has successfully corresponded about prior purchases with the customer’s email address or social-media identity.”
