Latest E-Commerce Fraud Scheme

In this latest trend, perpetrators have improved their ability to match the key parameters that most merchants monitor to detect suspicious behavior including: IP address, billing and shipping address, credit card number and other account and transaction data. When these identifiers all seem to match a legitimate customer and come from the same geographic location, the fraudulent transactions appear genuine to most fraud detection systems.

"Online merchants need to continually evolve their security methods to protect themselves and consumers from increasingly coordinated attacks," said Ori Eisen, CEO and founder, The 41st Parameter. "Using sophisticated PC 'fingerprinting' technology to compare order information with device data and other parameters such as time setting, time zone and language setting, makes identifying fraudulent transactions much more accurate, and helps identify suspect orders that may be undetected by traditional systems."

The 41st Parameter also finds that international fraudsters are using U.S.-based IP addresses, with U.S.-issued credit cards and shipping and billing information that also matches domestic records. As a result, online merchants are increasingly missing fraudulent orders, causing escalating chargeback rates (the process by which merchants reimburse legitimate customers for fraudulent purchases made in their name) while eroding consumer confidence in online shopping. For most online merchants, chargebacks are one of the key metrics used to measure the success or failure of online security systems.

Using its proprietary FraudNet™ solution and patent-pending TimeDiff Linking™ technology, The 41st Parameter successfully reduced a major e-commerce customer's chargebacks in the first year of implementation by more than 60 percent. The system invisibly collects a device "fingerprint" of any online machine based on more than 40 parameters to identify unique attributes from the PC. This device-level recognition capability helps determine if the account access or transaction source is a legitimate, known customer, or an unrecognized source that can be monitored or investigated prior to shipping merchandise.