Fraudsters Love Consumer Electronics. How Can We Stop Them?
by Ethoca
Consumer electronics are a popular target for fraudsters. Handheld gadgets such as tablets, smartphones, toys and cameras are high in value and in high demand. Despite investing heavily in sophisticated defences to catch fraud and stop bad orders before they’re shipped, many consumer electronics merchants continue to suffer serious losses and rack up unacceptable costs.
Unfortunately, simply clamping down with stricter fraud rules will likely result in good customers being wrongly turned away.
So, is there a way for retailers to stop bad orders and improve fraud tools without hurting sales or breaking the bank? That’s what a leading multinational retailer of technology products asked after one too many orders snuck through, it decided to leverage merchant-issuer collaboration and add Ethoca Alerts to its arsenal of defences.
How Is Fraud Stopped?
Thousands of times a day, card issuers and merchants identify fraudulent and/or suspicious transactions that have gone undetected by the other party, resulting in fraud losses and chargeback costs to both. Ethoca’s secure collaborative network closes the information gap between the card issuers and merchants, making this valuable information available in real-time. This gives merchants a unique window of opportunity to cancel orders before they leave the warehouse. The result? Fewer goods for fraudsters, less cost for our merchant and a secure, positive customer experience.
In addition, the merchant can use the wealth of data contained in every Ethoca alert to perform link analysis and look for further fraudulent orders in its system. So, fraudsters who place multiple orders using different names and address can also be detected.
Blocking Future Fraud
End-of-year holiday sales like Black Friday, and big product launches like the new Apple iPhone are a fraudster’s favourite time of year to hunt for consumer electronics. Thankfully, Ethoca alerts also help merchants protect themselves against future fraud and these seasonal spikes by identifying confirmed fraud, rather than all-too-common guesswork and false positives that comes from working with only suspected fraud.
The best part? As the network grows, the solution improves. The data used to confirm the accuracy of fraudulent transactions helps to improve and strengthen fraud tools against future attacks. These improved rules and models, combined with Ethoca’s growing network, connect merchants to data from hundreds of issuers in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America. This gives retailers the confidence to sell to customers across the globe with the knowledge that they are protected.
Now retailers have got an expanding fraud solution that provides protection for the present and the future, at home and abroad.
