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12 Apr, 2014

A Perfect Storm of Online Fraud Disasters Looms – Report

Cork, Ireland (PRWEB) April 11, 2014 – Online retailers lost $3.5 billion in sales last year through avoidable fraud, according to the first Global Fraud Briefing from Trustev, the global leader in real-time identity verification. As of April 2014, more than 250 million compromised credit-card numbers are being offered for sale online – a growing threat that is causing major losses for both retailers and consumers.

“In the twelve months since we started Trustev, the world has seen a deluge of personal identity information and credit cards leak online. The ease at which fraudsters can now buy and use credit card information is shocking, the majority of online merchants just aren’t ready for it,” said Pat Phelan, CEO of Trustev.

Phelan said: “The modern fraud industry is entirely data driven, but until now it’s been hard to know just how much risk retailers are facing. Most companies affected by fraud are incredible secretive. We hope that by exposing the data and insights that the Trustev platform collects on a monthly basis, we can help arm merchants with useful intelligence they can use to improve their approach to fraud.”

Key findings from the April 2014 report include;

* More than 250 million compromised identities and credit cards are available for sale online today. Recent large-scale data breaches in the USA have massively increased the number of credit cards available, while also driving down the price.

* Globally, online merchants lost over $3.5 billion in sales in 2013 to avoidable fraud. Fraud is starting to eat seriously into the revenues and profits of most major ecommerce platforms.

* In fraud detected across the Trustev network, over 37% involved attempts to hide or obscure the location behind the transaction. As more and more transactions go mobile, its getting harder for merchants to tie down accurate transaction locations.

* Compromised devices and automated behaviours were detected in over 34% of all fraud attempts, highlighting the need for consumers to better protect themselves.

* Social activity relevance when it comes to fraud continues to increase as over 29% of fraud attempts included information obtained or cloned from a social network or the fraud itself attempted to manipulate individuals through false social connections.

Trustev is making their new monthly updates available free of charge to help merchants protect their revenues against the ever growing problem of online fraud.

Trustev’s global fraud briefing (April) infographic is available for download and usage at http://share.bf.vu/1ju9Wev