How To Protect Your Business From Online Fraud This Holiday Season

Holiday shopping has changed a lot since the first Cyber Monday in 2005. Consumers spent just $608 million on that inaugural Cyber Monday. This year, we spent more than $3.5 billion – with about a third of it coming from mobile devices. Online and mobile shopping are expected to continue growing apace through the rest of the holiday season. Unfortunately, they’re not the only things on the rise: As chip-enabled cards have made brick-and-mortar shopping safer, fraudsters are increasingly targeting online stores. The widely-publicized Target credit card hack cost the company $252 million. A hefty sum, for sure, but nothing close to the $32 billion that online retailers spent preventing and remediating hacks and attacks the following year. This discrepancy is largely down to the fact that, unlike their brick-and-mortar counterparts, online businesses are responsible for not only detecting fraud, but also paying the associated costs. On average, every $1 of fraudulent orders costs an online business an additional $2.62 and a mobile business $3.34. These costs add up quickly, largely because online businesses are susceptible to a wider range of fraud schemes, including credit card fraud, payout scams and faux refunds. So what can online businesses do about it? Let’s start with the basics. Read more at Forbes.