How to Protect Your Customers from Fraud

by Sahil Verma SIFIPAY

More people than ever before are shopping online. And where there is money, there are cyber thieves, leaving consumers to wonder if their personal and financial information is truly secure.

According to IBM's Cost of Data Breach Report, data breach costs will rise from $3.86 million to $4.24 million globally in 2021, the highest average total cost in the report's 17-year history.

At the same time, retailers are vulnerable to significant losses as a result of fraud. According to one estimate, retailers will lose more than $20 billion in 2021 due to fraudulent online activities such as identity theft, chargeback fraud, and account takeovers.

This means that you, as an online retailer, and your payment provider or the best online payment gateway India, must implement best-in-class security to give your customers complete confidence in your ecommerce business. Here is a two-step approach we recommend for fraud prevention in your business.

Phase 1: Strengthen your security

We've identified four areas to help improve security and save your business money in the long run to help strengthen fraud prevention.

Determine your PCI compliance strategy

When considering your payment strategy, one of the most important decisions you'll make is whether to host payment processing yourself or outsource it to a third party. This choice will have a direct impact on your level of responsibility for managing PCI compliance.

You are fully responsible for managing all PCI compliance, including an annual card security assessment, if you use the self-hosted model. Depending on your company's size, you may also need to hire a Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) to ensure that you are PCI compliant.

With the fully hosted model, you offload much of the responsibility for card security compliance to a PCI-compliant third-party processor who will handle the majority of your payment processing needs. Because the payment processor or the online payment gateway is responsible for protecting all cardholder data in its possession, the fully hosted model allows you to reduce your PCI compliance burden. Because this is their primary focus, they can invest in the technology and processes needed to keep your customer data secure.

Take advantage of tokenization

Tokenization allows you to replace sensitive data like primary account numbers (PANs) and customer information with tokens that protect access to a customer's payment data. As a result, your customers' data is safe because your company can only interact with the tokenized version of that data. Furthermore, tokenization is irreversible; once the data is tokenized, it cannot be reversed. As a result, your customers' data cannot be restored to its original state, limiting cybercriminals' ability to steal customer payment information.

Enable 3D Secure

The payment networks' online authentication solutions are referred to as 3D Secure (3DS).

It is an authentication protocol that is intended to reduce fraud, improve customer security, and reduce merchant liability for chargebacks.

Offer multi-factor authentication

During the pandemic, account takeovers cost ecommerce businesses 282 percent of their revenue as fraudsters attempted to steal payment data or place fraudulent orders using weak or stolen passwords. You can provide customers with an extra layer of security that is independent of their password by incorporating multi-factor authentication (MFA).

When a customer enters their password to complete an online transaction, they will be given the option of receiving a one-time code via text or email. If the customer transaction is legitimate, the customer will most likely have their phone and will be able to enter the code provided without difficulty. However, if it's a fraudster attempting to log in with a stolen password, they won't be able to access the phone and will be out of luck.

MFA necessitates at least two types of authentication, each from a different category. These are some examples:

Something you are familiar with (knowledge), such as a password or PIN.
Something you own, such as a phone or a credit card.
A retina scan or fingerprint are examples of what you are (inherence).

Other methods of authentication include secret question answers (knowledge), a token or key fob (possession), or biometrics such as voice or facial recognition (inherence).

Phase 2: Promote your security to your customers

Once you've established security protocols, make sure you communicate what you're doing and why with your customers in order to increase their trust in your brand and encourage them to transact. Here are some ideas to boost your security:

At the checkout and throughout your website, display trust logos from reputable financial brands.
With the PCI DSS trust logo, you can show that your company is PCI compliant at the checkout.
Explain why you want customers to use 3D Secure to verify their payment information.
In the URL bar of your browser, represent your SSL certificate with a lock.

Demonstrate to your customers that you're encrypting or masking sensitive data as they enter it in real time.

Emphasizing your security protocols can also serve as a natural deterrent to would-be cybercriminals looking for easy prey. If fraudsters see that you've done your homework and put in place strong security protocols, they may decide to look elsewhere.