We often get questions from our clients asking how to protect themselves from fraudulent orders, especially during the holiday season. These orders are getting more and more difficult to catch, because the hackers are getting more sophisticated.
Websites do have some great fraud detection features that can help safe-guard your store from fraudulent orders. Now add a little common sense and you should be can determine if an order is fraudulent or not. My dad used to say regarding old prescriptions, “When in Doubt, Throw It Out!” and the same principle applies to suspicious looking e-commerce orders.
So you just received an order on your website that looks suspicious, what do you do?
- Login to the back-end and view the order in question.
- Does the value of the order look suspicious? Maybe it’s much large than your average order in value?
- On most platforms, on the order screen, you will often see a “Fraud Analysis” icon. It will have a sliding gauge on the top of the tile indicating the Fraud Analysis level. If it says High, proceed with caution.
- Under Fraud Analysis click “View Full Analysis”
- You will see the name and email of the person that placed the order. Do a Google search for both and see if any negative information turns up on Google for those two items.
- Check the billing address and billing zip code of the credit card used to place the order. Also check to see if the CCV number matches.
- Check the billing and shipping information, are they suspicious too?
- Finally, go to a website like WhatIsMyIPAddress.com. Select IP Lookup, enter the IP address from the order information and enter it into the field on WHatIsMyIPAddress.com to check the IP.
- Does it look like the IP address is the same address or city that the order was placed from? If not, that may be suspicious also.
The final decision whether or not to fulfill the order is yours alone. After looking at all of the pertinent information about the purchaser you will need to make that decision. If something doesn’t seem right, cancel the order.
When in Doubt, Throw It Out!
Rich Petrelli, Founder
MyWebConcepts.com
