Unwinding the Complex System of Fraud Prevention

It’s 8:00 am on Sunday morning. You wake up to the echo of your alarm and groggily tell Alexa to snooze for just ten minutes. And another ten. And another. After recovering from a deep slumber, you wake up and blast tunes from your favorite smart speaker. Motivated for the day ahead, you grab your fitness tracker and finally hit the gym.

From the minute we wake up, technology becomes an innate part of our lives. It is the phenomenon of the Internet of Things (IoT) and an ever-expanding Internet ecosystem that makes us more connected than ever before. According to research company, Gartner, over 20 billion devices will be connected by the year 2020, creating more and more opportunities for innovation and convenience. The only thing that’s not so convenient is the inevitable surge in the theft of people’s personal data, which in turn, is providing cybercriminals with a trove of information to attempt and commit online fraud.

The possibilities are endless for criminals seeking entry into stores of personal information. In a world where smart hairbrushes and trash cans exist, not only in our wildest imaginations, but right there in front of us, we must begin to wonder how the landscape of fraud will evolve now that so much more stolen personal and financial data is in the possession of criminals.  But, with the personal data of millions of people now in the wrong hands, online businesses need to be more vigilant than ever with their fraud prevention defenses.

“The most important thing for a business or merchant to remember is that they are not alone in fighting fraud,” says Adam Rogas, CEO of fraud protection company NS8. He continues, “Unwinding the complex system of fraud prevention can seem quite overwhelming but working with the right experts can make fraud prevention much more manageable.”

Merchants in the eCommerce space could especially benefit from the extra support. With global eCommerce growing rapidly on mobile platforms, merchants will need to become increasingly vigilant and embrace the use of verification tools to score users and session data. Nowadays, it’s not enough to verify payments and personally identifiable information. Merchants must recognize fraud earlier in the process and utilize third-party data and automated verification tools. The cost of not taking these precautions is gigantic, $2.94 for every dollar of digital fraud to be exact.

Luckily, resources like NS8 (http://www.ns8.com/) are available to take the guesswork out of the ever-complex world of Internet fraud. NS8 Protect is a tool that empowers eCommerce businesses to defend themselves on multiple fronts and avoid the deep losses that are often discovered in fraudulent attacks. It scores everything from first click to finish and provides a composite scoring methodology that gives businesses the most comprehensive view possible of the visitors to their site. NS8 operates by scoring users at the session level, and the software fights ad fraud as well by identifying those ad campaigns which are delivering bots and low-quality traffic. From there, poorly performing ad campaigns are blocked from future retargeting.

The fight against Internet fraud can certainly feel like an uphill battle but with the right guidance and knowledge to carry with you, your business will go much further. To get you to the top, here are a few pieces of advice from Mr. Rogas, a security expert himself.

“My first piece of advice to smaller eCommerce businesses would be to educate themselves on the threats posted by fraud and what the consequences may be if they’re not proactive in doing so Losses tied to eCommerce fraud and advertising fraud have reached massive levels on the global scale, so understanding why it is important to attain session data (to detect fraud) for all of your site traffic is of the utmost importance.”

“Businesses need to stay up to date on fraud prevention and security, understand what the threats are, and know what the best available tools to deal with them are. You can’t sit back and rest, and constant vigilance is required as fraudsters evolve and change their methods of attack. Make sure you commit time and allocate the resources to deal with protecting your business and revenues.”