How Merchants Can Reduce Payment Fraud

In today's world merchants are starting to transfer more and more of their operations online, but as we all know, that's not a safe environment for anyone and especially if your system's security and countermeasures are not strong enough to defend against the threats you might face. Many cybercriminals are just waiting for the opportunity to use your business for their malicious purposes.

With the growing rates of cybercrime, nobody can afford to stay passive and do nothing any longer. As a merchant, it's your responsibility to strengthen your system and your processes to protect the business in general. You are the only one who can protect your business from cyber-attacks. One of the most common frauds the ecommerce business can and most likely will encounter is Card Not Present Fraud. This kind of fraud occurs when a payment scam is made online by providing the card details without having the physical card present. In even simpler terms, this is a type of cybercrime that allows fraudsters to use stolen card details without actually having to steal a card. All information they've got is just collected via different online schemes like online phishing.

Are There any Ways to Prevent Card Not Present (CNP) Fraud?

That's the question that is probably running through your head right now, but there is no short answer for that. Truth is that you won't be able to completely eliminate card not present fraud, but by taking certain protective measures you can reduce it significantly. These 4 easy steps will help you to reduce CNP fraud and protect your business.

Gather Customer Information

The first step you need to take is to gather your customers' information and store it in a database. This process will aid you in validating your customers' future transactions by checking the information you have previously collected about them. From there, you can verify if the transaction is legit or suspicious and it can also help you in protecting your business from account takeover or identity theft frauds. Here's the list of some suggested information that you can ask from your customers.

Card information (Card number and CVV)
Email address
Home/Billing address
IP Address
Contact number

2. Introduce Data enrichment into your security protocol

Now another question that might come to your mind is how are you going to gather additional information about your customer's considering that you don't want to ruin your customer’s experience in your business. The best solution for that is by using Data Enrichment tools which will supply you with additional data without having to ask the customers. It is a simple process of collecting additional data from internal and external sources to enrich the original raw data you collected from the customer

3. Check Customer Intent

This might sound absurd, but yes, you can actually verify your customers' intent through online means. When using data enrichment tools, you don't need to see them face to face to consider them as suspicious customers. So how does it work? You just need to keep an eye on some red flags and react on time. Here are some suspicious actions that you need to keep track of.

Multiple changes occurring to an account during a single session.
Massive transfer of reward points
Multiple users having the same IP address or too similar device fingerprint
Multiple changes in the shipping address
Multiple login attempts or passwords reset request
Unreasonably large purchase

4. Implement Multi-factor authentication (MFA)

Another way of protecting your customers is by requiring them to go through additional authentication requirements in addition to their username and password when doing some transactions. Each company can decide what their extra level of protection will be, as it can be anything from an extra password, one-time code that was sent to their email or to the phone via text or a security question. As a business owner you need to make sure every aspect of your business is functioning to its highest possibilities. Cybersecurity is still not a priority for a lot of ecommerce businesses as they are not aware of the threats they are facing but that needs to change. Cyber attacks are on the rise and they can impact everybody regardless of the type or the size of the business. Priorities need to start changing and every business owner needs to step up in the fight against the cyber threats.