Beware! E-commerce and online fraud continue to exist

What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) is not entirely true with online shopping. Money has taken on a whole new dimension with electronic money transfer, electronic funds transfer and various online transactions. The Internet was not created to be a secure medium for the transmission of information. Money transactions on the network had attracted hordes of fraudsters. E-commerce sites, banks, credit card companies, and other financial institutions have reported various hacking attempts on their servers and sites. Some of these hacking attempts have been successful and these companies quickly resulted in a damage control exercise. These scammers have come up with new methods and one of those methods is called social engineering. This depends on instilling fear or the scammer appearing as a genuine party and extracting credit card and other financial information via email (phishing). Another recent method is ‘domain name system server poisoning’ through pharming, which is setting off alarm bells for e-commerce sites.

Online shopping still attracts customers. New rules and policies have been put in place to deal with security issues. Processing of credit card transactions and checks have been launched. Unfortunately, these are only used and implemented by the major players. Merchants with multiple online stores still need to ensure that their shopping cart software providers and other online shopping programs meet security guidelines for online transactions.

One of the benefits of e-commerce is automation. You can have an online money and invoice transaction website to manage your sales. It has the ability to perform a number of transactions at the same time. The drawback is that there is a lot of traffic on the sites and these sites do not look for any suspicious activity. Pattern analysis is important to identify e-commerce fraud. Most merchants realize a fraud has occurred 30-40 days after the event. In many cases everything looks authentic and even the currency exchanges are authentic. But the merchandise reaches the scammer. Credit card theft is rampant on the Internet and e-commerce is also affected by this.

Don’t be intimidated by shopping cart fraud. Get the right shopping cart software and other third-party online payment solutions for a secure transaction and get things right again. Gateway’s fraud prevention tools have many features to help you with security.

o AVS is a verification system of the address entered by the customer against the one provided by the credit card number.

o The IP gateway maintains a database of selected IP addresses used for past fraud. Payments from these IP addresses are blocked.

o CVV2 is a code that is not stored by the merchant when making a transaction. If any e-commerce sites have been hacked and the credit card numbers of those making purchases have been obtained. They don’t have this code yet. If the CVV2 is not entered or does not match the records, the payment is rejected. Many tests to enter the CVV2 code are also rejected.

o Potential staff can also perform manual checks if they believe a fraudulent transaction is taking place.

o The Mater Card Site Data Protection Program (SDP) and the Visa Cardholder Information Security Program (CISP) are methods that should be integrated into any eCommerce software solution.

Future e-commerce shopping cart and payment processing systems should not only be good at combating Internet-level fraud, but should also meet the authentication and security requirements of credit cards.