Endless New Year offers attract both ordinary buyers and scammers, despite the difficult times. This is why a differentiated strategy aimed at preventing fraud and minimizing losses is very important. Shoppers themselves often change the model and interaction during shopping for sending the gift by adding a new address or card. Thus, they receive an increased spending limit or reward. New consumer behavior is hampering fraud prevention algorithms.

Online shopping is projected to increase this year due to restrictions imposed in shopping centers. It is now more important for merchants to apply a differentiated anti-fraud strategy. A strategy that adapts and responds to changing customer behavior to minimize losses from fraud.

This article provides three tips for reducing fraud during the holiday season and increasing profits during peak sales periods.

First: Figure out what is your fraud attack zone

It may seem obvious at first, but you need to identify and list the products you offer that scammers can benefit from through resale or self-use.

One of the main strategies for protecting against fraud is identifying potential locations where you might be attacked. It is important to understand that a product that is produced in limited quantities but at a large discount is more likely to be attacked than one that is available all the time at a small discount. Disposable digital goods or non-subscription digital goods have a more broad and focused target audience than physical goods.

This list usually also includes products that most of your customers would like to receive.

If you weaken the values for deciding whether to cheat, you risk becoming an easy target for fraud. Rather than loosening it up, evaluate if you can enforce constraints such as the maximum amount and use as a watch list for reviews and reporting.

Also, if you have configured a manual verification process for individual transactions, then consider adding a confirmation or delivery delay until verification is complete.

Second: Establish internal fast communication channels with fraud

Sales and related fraudulent attempts can last anywhere from hours to days. During this time, there will be maximum information surge due to escalation of customers and reports of purchases made and fraud prevention.

Removing noise from important signals in real time is one of the top priorities. Traditional communication methods such as emails and support tickets may not meet these needs.

You can customize the channels in which cross-functional communication takes place in real time. These include collaboration tools - Microsoft Teams, incident management tools, team room techniques. You can include fraud analysts, customer support agents, and any other groups involved in anti-fraud or customer escalation, verification agents, in quick communication channels. This will give you the ability to quickly eliminate false positives when customers are blocked on suspicion of fraud and identify new fraud patterns by reacting to them.

Third: Track trends in real time whenever possible

During the rush of holiday sales activity, it is essential to monitor the trends as near to real-time as possible and as granular as possible. Set up reporting on decisions and trends such as reject rate, approval rate, review rate, and trends of total volume and score distribution with views across slices of products, geographies, and user segments. All teams responsible for fraud prevention should always have a hawk's eye on these reports and be ready to quickly jump-in if suspicious trends are seen.

How Microsoft can help your business effectively counter holiday fraud

If you are a Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection user, you have the option of virtual fraud analytics to get a segmented view of your fraud profiles and your products. The system gives you real-time insight into support tools and productivity. This tool examines all transactions, risks and history. In addition, you can take advantage of the accelerated transaction acceptance function in order to exchange data with online banks and improve the quality of customer service by reducing the number of failures by mistake.

Article publication source:

https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/