As a business owner, you’ve worked hard to open your doors. You’ve taken out business loans, developed goods and services that you’re proud of and have done the necessary marketing and advertising to spread the word about your company. In spite of your best efforts, you may find yourself having to deal with deceptive consumers.
“Fraud” is a word that makes many business owners cringe. Even if you don’t want to think about the realities of theft, you have to be smart about the way you do business or you risk getting taken advantage of. Whether most of your transactions are performed online or you have an actual brick-and-mortar shop, you need to have safeguards in place to prevent against deceptive...
By Melody Lashmar - Quickly! Can you find your customer support number? How about an email address? Can you navigate your website to find the information you would need to question a transaction or cancel a membership or seek a refund?
If you can't find these pieces of information easily, you can be sure consumers who were billed by you can't find them either.
Providing this...
By Melody Lashmar - Data, Analytics, Cross Platform Validations, Mobile. These disparate areas are all converging in the effort to thwart fraudsters and the transactions which they initiate.
It wasn’t that long ago that banks were completely segmented in their operations, management and platforms that were responsible for performing the various functions of the bank. As...
By Melody Lashmar - Merchants want to be able to offer their consumers the ability to pay with their preferred payment method but this desire has to be balanced with the practical aspect of the most relevant payment methods for the consumers and only offering those payment methods that do not open the merchant up to unnecessary vulnerabilities. One of the biggest aspects of...
By Melody Lashmar - Issue 3: Online purchasing is targeted by fraudsters with computer programs to find and use card numbers.
This past year I had the good fortune to participate in a day of education related to credit card fraud: how it happens and how we can reduce it. I was delighted to see this article that shows one such credit card ring getting eliminated. One of the key points to this setup is to note the length of time and the depth of detail that has gone into this fraud ring. These people are...
By Melody Lashmar - Another mention of consumer initiated fraud was found in this paper published by the Philadelphia Fed http://www.philadelphiafed.org/consumer-credit-and-payments/payment-cards-center/publications/discussion-papers/2002/fraudmanagement_042002.pdf, In November 2001, The Philadelphia Federal Reserve office hosted a workshop on fraud management in the credit card...
By Melody Lashmar - In my search for any indication that someone has investigated this problem of Consumer Initiated Fraud, I came across a survey that was published in the Journal of Marketing in October 1978. The title of this publication is "Fraudulent Behavior of Consumers. The other side of fraud in the marketplace: consumer-initiated fraud against a business." This survey...
