San Francisco—Feb. 22, 2016—Hackers are on the loose and coming to an online merchant near you. In droves. In fact, the rate of fraud attacks is up 163 percent from 2015—and luxury retail is at the top of the fraudsters’ checklists. PYMNTS and Forter teamed up to benchmark this unique look at fraud and lay it all out in the premier edition of The Global Fraud Attack Index, a quarterly report. Find out where attacks are happening, to whom, what merchants can do to hold them at ba, and how much those attacks cost merchants last year.
Ninety-four percent and 163 percent. These two numbers pretty much tell the story of fraud online in 2015.
Ninety-four percent is the extent to which fraud as a percentage of revenue for online merchants increased year over year (2014 to 2015). Fraud attempts on digital goods alone increased by 2.5 times from the first quarter of 2015 to the third quarter of 2015.
One hundred and sixty-three percent is the increase in the rate of fraud attacks. Fraud is big business and fraudsters are increasingly sophisticated business professionals. And it seems that they are using more tools—more often—to try to score big—at the merchant’s expense, of course.
But there is good news, as hard as that may be to believe. Fraud prevention starts with understanding where fraud is coming from, what tools fraudsters are using and where they are targeting—which is a moving target itself.
The Global Fraud Attack Index™, a PYMNTS/Forter collaboration, was conceived to help track, analyze and report on the important trends happening in the world of fraud as it relates to payments and commerce. Every quarter, the companies monitor how fraud attempts, reflected as a percent of U.S. sales transactions, on U.S. merchant websites are trending. Up? Down? Stable? Time to panic? Hopefully not.
The companies report this in several different ways. They have an index metric that measures the rate of fraud attempts on U.S. online merchants and how that changes over time. They also explore different aspects of fraud, such as how merchant segments are affected by fraud trends and whether U.S. fraudsters tend to use local manipulation more than European fraudsters—and how that is trending. And then there’s what can be done to help stop or slow down fraud trends—and how that is working (or not).
