Online retailers winning the battle against fraud
Web crime levels drop over last year as retailers and customers exercise additional caution
Nearly two-thirds of online retailers have experienced a fall or stall in online fraud in the last 12 months, according to a survey by secure payment firm CyberSource.
Nathan Jackson, managing director of CyberSource, said: “While retailers are investing heavily in beating fraud, often successfully according to our research, the public is being made to feel nervous about shopping on the web. The online retail community needs to continue working to beat fraudsters, but while we should be promoting prudence we shouldn’t be scaring the consumer away from buying online.”
Mark Bowerman, a representative for the Association of Payment Clearing Services, said: “This is interesting as our figures for the first six months of this year showed that card-not-present fraud was still rising – however, the proportion for online fraud was low. Perhaps a lot of the online retailers surveyed had signed up to Visa and MasterCard’s security schemes which help combat fraud.”
The UK online fraud survey by CyberSource also revealed that 16 per cent of online retailers felt that fraud had risen as a proportion of revenues.
Paul Graham, managing director of online retailer Excite IT, set up in February, said: “Fraud is a big concern to us, but the electronic payment processor we have installed uses the latest technology, and those transactions that get through the system we can still check manually. We take every precaution to combat being a target for fraud.”
Jonathan Wall, marketing director at dabs.com, said: “Dabs was one of the first merchants in the UK to implement 3D secure with MasterCard and Verified by Visa, and as both these schemes switch liability from the merchant to the card issuer we have seen an almost complete reduction in cost of fraud on MasterCard and Visa cards. Maestro (Switch) will shortly follow so we will be almost fraud free in terms of liability. However, this is not to say that people aren’t still out there committing the fraud; it’s just that we aren’t liable for it now.”