Verisign's Fraud Protection Services

Why Fraud Protection?

Perhaps you've never experienced online fraud. Or maybe you have, but you're still not convinced you need fraud protection services. The statistics on online fraud might alarm you.

Online stores experience fraud 17 times more often than offline stores. An estimated $1.8 billion will be lost to credit card fraud in 2003. 1 in 6 online consumers has been the victim of credit card fraud. In other words, even if you haven't experienced online fraud, odds are you eventually will. Criminals are constantly trolling the Internet, hoping to take advantage of vulnerabilities in your online security. And once they find an unsecured point of entry, they are able to commit some pretty ingenious forms of online theft. But say you're lucky enough to beat the odds. Though you may not realize it, the ways in which you're compensating for not having fraud protection are losing you money and draining your resources. Any way you look at it, fraud protection makes good business sense. Read up on the facts. The conclusions will be obvious.

No Protection = Business Inefficiency

Types of Online Theft

Online Points of Entry

No Protection = Business Inefficiency

Not effectively protecting yourself against fraud is hurting your business in ways you may not even realize. VeriSign estimates that the average merchant is losing thousands of dollars each month in the form of:

• Revenues lost when turning away legitimate customers that only seem suspicious.
• Higher interchange rates and penalties incurred when processing fraudulent payments.
• Employee time & resources wasted on manually investigating fraud claims or contacting customers about suspicious or incomplete purchase information

Types of Online Threats

Online merchants may not realize they're facing a triple threat online. All online payment fraud falls into one of the following three categories:

Product Theft

Occurs when a criminal uses stolen credit card information to purchase goods and services for themselves or for resale. The criminal gets access to legitimate credit card information in any number of ways. Some of the most common include the following:

• Criminals take credit card information off discarded paper credit card receipts that bear complete credit card number and expiration date
• At restaurants or cash registers, criminals using handheld "skimmers" to digitally scan credit card numbers in seconds
• Criminals steal customer credit card information by hacking into online merchant customer databases via misconfigured or unsecured web servers, networks, shopping carts or hosting providers.

Identity Theft

Occurs when stolen credit card information is combined with readily available social security numbers and address information to open new credit cards under the criminal's name and address. Can ruin a consumer's credit record.

Cash Theft

Occurs when criminals "break into" your virtual cash register by stealing merchant account access information and impersonating you to issue credits or payments to themselves. Criminals can hack into your database or backend system to obtain payment gateway account password and user information.

Online Points of Entry

Criminals will breach your security any way they can. To protect your online business, be sure to protect yourself on all three levels of access.

Network Level

• How accessed?
  • Criminals access your merchant account or customer database via unsecured areas in your network or server.
• Protect Yourself
  • Use allowed IP address feature to ensure that only designated computers can access your network.
  • Regularly update patches on servers and operating systems and invest in regular port scans to identify network vulnerabilities.

Transaction Level

• How accessed?
  • Criminals enter stolen credit card information on your check out page to commit product theft.
• Protect Yourself
  • Use transaction filters to proactively screen for and block suspicious transactions. Filter intelligence can screen for factors like high risk zip codes, AVS failure, or unusually high transaction amounts. Filters can also validate shipping addresses and screen for high risk countries. Complete list of filters.

Account Level

• How accessed?
  • Criminals gain access to your merchant account using stolen account access information obtained by hacking into your database or back end system, by physically obtaining login and password information from employees or by breaking into office buildings or going through a business's garbage.
• Protect Yourself
  • Use strong passwords (alphanumeric with symbols) and change passwords regularly.
  • Use "transaction settings" to limit access to high risk administrative transactions, like issuing credits.
  • Use "account monitoring" and have VeriSign watch your account for signs of unauthorized access.