First Published 5th February, 2021
Travel companies are learning how to adjust to the evolving shopping behavior, including the way one goes about completing a transaction, and accordingly improvising on their fraud prevention tactics.
There are several facets that merchants have had to deal with over the last 10 months or so.
- Defining good customer and differentiating from a bad customer: Assessment needs to start the moment a user arrives on a page or a mobile app. For evaluating whether a user is a “good user” or not, just don’t only rely on device attributes or historical transactional data. Understand the actual behavior, for instance, via behavorial biometrics, points out SecuredTouch’s Lewis Duker. As companies attempt to separate “good customers from bad ones”, automated fraud prevention is critical to quickly verify a customer’s identity. Look at the whole journey, from registration or login to checkout, according to Forter’s Stuart Barwood.
- Understand when does the fraud attack happen: “(A fraud attack) doesn’t happen at the point of monetization or redemption, but when it is compromised or when fake account is created successfully,” shared Daniel Shkedi, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Forter.
- Assess what to focus on: Where are fraudsters focusing on? Is accounttakeover (ATO) fraud flourishing? Is “card testing” evolving?
- How can payment and fraud teams provide the necessary support when faced with a skeleton crew? How do you do more with less?
- Customer refunds for fraudulent travel bookings
- It is important for travel suppliers to adjust their fraud models based on new customer behavior. For instance, how to make the most of fraud rules and machine learning for shopping during day-time or the tendency to book last minute. Also, as highlighted in the Nuvei latest report, fraudsters are using extra flexibility given to passengers to their advantage such as the misuse of vouchers for alternate routings. So how to deal with this?
- Is there a shift toward completing a transaction with a credit card rather than using an alternative form of payment? And if yes, why so? How to deal with payments made via call centers?
- Dealing “professional refunders”: Travel merchants must look into the issue of employee fraud, and how their own staff is mingling with fraud rings for cohesive fraudulent attacks. Concerns relating to remote workers indulging in fraud have come true and some of them indeed present a new fraud and security threat in the age of #coronavirus, shared Microsoft’s Global Fraud Lead, Sondra Feinberg in an interview last year.
- Counting on payment data analytics – how additional information related to the travel booking (e.g. airport for departure/arrival, type of ticket) and transaction can help optimize fraud rules? Leverage payments data analytics at the transaction level to better understand customers, limit fraud and improve customer experience at check-out.
- Focus on security that is always on, learning and catching threats as they emerge and evolve, and leverage a real-time network of global cybersecurity intelligence, AI and machine learning.
By Ritesh Gupta
Ai Editorial Team
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