There’s both, good and bad news for businesses.
The good news is that business revenues are estimated to exceed $6.5 trillion by 2023.
What’s the bad news?
This increase in online sales will be accompanied by an increase in e-commerce fraud.
You’re mistaken if you think your customers are the sole people vulnerable to online fraud. With recent data thefts at major retailers and a rise in forged correspondence, businesses are becoming more susceptible to email and online fraud. According to the CEO of Sidepost, if even the most unqualified people like domestic cleaners can pull off scams with relative ease, then what more can professional scammers do? He goes on to say that “…companies must be extra careful and maintain internal controls that can prevent or detect fraud.”
With the advent of online commerce pushed by COVID-19, e-commerce fraud has changed and intensified. According to a Juniper Research report, e-commerce companies may lose an estimated $24 billion to online payment fraud by 2024.
While rises in business fraud are nothing new, unscrupulous actors are implementing more sophisticated fraud attempts.
It is more crucial than ever to be proactive in detecting and preventing e-commerce fraud. Investing in the correct e-commerce fraud protection technologies may have a significant impact on both consumer safety and financial returns. Many consumer-oriented online security practices can also safeguard enterprises.
In this article, we will talk about ways to protect yourself against online business fraud.
How Can You Protect Yourself Against Online Business Fraud 2022
Here are a few tips that will help you protect yourself against online business fraud.
- Keep financial data separate
- Implement card security code
- Take measures to prevent SQL injection
- Verify identity
- Beware of phishing
- Use HTTPS
- Set limit on the number of transactions
- Cross-check IP addresses
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Keep financial data separate
Use a separate pc for all business financial operations. Use other devices to access the Web and do non-banking activities. When it’s time to ditch the pc that was used to manage business finance, create a backup of any confidential material information and wipe the hard disk before discarding it.
2. Implement card security code
Some e-commerce activities, such as card-not-present (CNP) purchases, are more likely to be fraudulent. A consumer is not required to provide a card in order to complete a CNP transaction. Customers frequently use CNP transactions while making purchases online, through a mobile app, or over the phone.
As companies and merchants cannot immediately validate a cardholder’s identity, these transactions are more vulnerable to fraud. To avoid CNP fraud, businesses should need card security codes. Requesting the three- or four-digit code for each card can help lessen the likelihood of a fraudulent transaction.
3. Take measures to prevent SQL injection
An SQLI is a sort of cyberattack in which thieves use software vulnerabilities in online applications to steal, destroy, or change data, or gain administrative access over the computers hosting the affected apps.
Here are a few tips for preventing SQL injection attacks.
- Simply patching and upgrading your database management software will safeguard you.
- Each account has only the access necessary to perform its function. An online account that just requires read access to a database, for example, should not be able to write, modify, or alter data in any manner.
- SQLI attacks are frequently the result of shoddy code. Inform your software developers ahead of time about your security expectations.
- Written statements or database queries should be used. In this manner, fraudsters are prevented from piggybacking harmful SQL injections onto legal SQL queries.
4. Verify identity
The first step that any business owner should do to prevent losses due to fraud is to verify the identification. The greatest risk management strategy is ID verification. However, many organizations may ignore this precautionary measure since it appears to be a technique reserved for financial institutions.
Identity verification with SEON is a great way to automate the process. You can easily verify IP addresses, analyze social media, Scrutinize email and phone, and much more.
ID authentication is a fraud-prevention strategy that, as long as the customer has a form of identity or another document that may be accepted for verification, can nearly always deliver a conclusive signal of danger.
Verifying the consumer’s identification offers a layer of safety for the retailer. Document verification as a prerequisite for conducting transactions acts as a check and balance mechanism.
5. Beware of phishing
Phishing emails are not uncommon. These emails are intended to urge you to click on links contained within them in order to substantiate or alter your profile in some way.
Email links are frequently used by scammers to install malware on the pc or smartphone you use to view your email. These malware has the ability to steal personal details.
6. Use HTTPS
HTTPS is the principal protocol used for exchanging data between a user’s internet browser and an online business. It is an encrypted version of HTTP. HTTPS encodes data to safeguard sensitive data such as user names, locations, and credit card details from attackers, therefore protecting crucial consumer data.
Using HTTPS prohibits the online store’s interactions from being broadcast in a way that attackers, hackers, and scammers may readily access. By purchasing an SSL certificate, the online shop may use HTTPS. HTTPS is regarded as an efficient protective strategy against ordinary internet scams of a less complex sort.
7. Set a limit on the number of transactions
Based on order kinds and business income trends, e-commerce merchants can place restrictions on the number of transactions and total dollar value they will accept from a single account in a single day. This limits the merchant’s exposure in the event of fraud.
Furthermore, Chargebacks911 believes that merchant mistake accounts for 20 to 40% of chargebacks. Such chargebacks should be avoided by eliminating ambiguous billing descriptions or perplexing return rules, which might irritate legitimate consumers.
8. Cross-check IP address
Every order placed on the e-commerce online business is assigned a distinct public IP address. The IP address may typically be used to determine the geographic region or city of the consumer making the online transaction.
If this city or area does not resemble the location of the credit card being used, the transaction is flagged. This can serve as a significant fraud prevention strategy since it can detect and flag fake orders in their early stages.
Conclusion
That’s all for this article. Hopefully, the aforementioned tips will help you prevent online fraud in your business.
In addition to following these best practices, online businesses should avoid shipping orders to PO boxes and other virtual addresses, such as those used by freight forwarders. Fraudsters typically evade discovery by concealing their actual address and preferring to use a PO Box or another anonymous place. Fraudsters are aware that the authorities cannot determine a virtual address that is not physical.
For any online firm, eliminating all fraud is exceedingly unlikely. However, if businesses take these fraud-prevention methods seriously, they may do a lot to lessen the impact of fraud on their company’s bottom line.
Author – Tuba Sarosh
