Rafael Lourenco
Ecommerce fraud doesn't happen only online anymore. As more people worldwide gain internet access and shop online in new and different ways, fraudsters have a growing pool of potential victims and more options for committing theft. Organized criminals now target ecommerce shoppers and sellers with schemes that combine online purchases with in-store pickups, corruption of shipping processes, and duping unsuspecting people into acting as in-person conduits for their stolen goods. Because online and offline fraud are increasingly connected, retailers must treat fraud prevention as a multichannel problem.
More transactions involve digital channels
Global internet access, particularly mobile internet access, has expanded rapidly during the past decade. The number of people worldwide with internet accessgrew from 1.37 billion in 2007 to 3.58 billion in 2017. Mobile traffic accounted for more than half of global internet traffic in 2017, and Gartner has projected that by 2020, 85% of consumer interactions with companies will be handled by AI, a huge change from the days when the majority of interactions were in-person or by phone.
As consumers increasingly shop online and blend online and in-person shopping experiences, even stores that now operate primarily in the brick and mortar space need to sell in digital channels in order to stay viable. Multichannel retail is virtually imperative now—but it also comes with multiple types of fraud-prevention and customer-experience challenges.
More opportunities for multi-layer fraud schemes
Organized criminals have shown over and over that they will utilize any new channel or customer touchpoint to commit fraud, so it shouldn't be surprising that they've already found ways to exploit multichannel vulnerabilities to create sophisticated fraud schemes that operate across channels. Here are a few examples:
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