30th November, 2022
Travel e-commerce remains a lucrative proposition for fraudsters, but is fraud prevention getting its due or still being seen as a standalone function?
The need of the hour is to ensure an entity’s fraud detection strategy is flexible and responsive to unanticipated changes or developments. Rules and models possibly need a re-look quite often, supported by human expertise and data analytics, calling for a stronger mechanism to deal with fraud in the post-pandemic era.
A top priority is to ensure that a “good” customer isn’t stopped from completing what they had set out for.
Even though savvy organizations are ensuring they have the right team/ skill set (analytical skills, non-technical ones etc.) in place, it is still being pointed out that not enough is being done to curb developments such as loyalty fraud. In fact, as it emerged during a recent webinar hosted by the Loyalty Security Alliance, loyalty managers still have trouble getting enough attention and involvement from senior management and decision-makers to adequately address these fraud issues. “There is more awareness (about loyalty fraud) due to data breaches. But there is a rarely a dedicated team for the same, it is a work in progress,” said Kevin Lee, Sift’s VP of Trust & Safety.
Some other considerations:
- Consider fraud and payment flow to be a part of revenue optimization, rather than a back-office reconciliation function;
- Working out a culture in place that evaluates vulnerabilities of digital assets;
- Ongoing training;
- Re-evaluating the risk appetite (Isn’t there much bigger loss in revenue when a merchant simply declines transactions, rather than risking clearing a fraudulent one and learning from it? How to manage false positives better?);
- Learning about fraudsters’ creativity – what’s happening on the dark web, how do they play the waiting game before they act like fraudulent transactions via stolen accounts, data etc.
By Ritesh Gupta, Ai Events
