Ways to Prevent Fraud on Your Website

As the internet has grown, so has the number of attempts to exploit this powerful medium. Nowadays, even small websites owners have to worry about protecting themselves from online fraud. What are some ways that the small website owner can protect their e-commerce website from these fraudsters? The following article will suggest some easy preventative actions that can thwart online fraud.

1. Review All Orders: Although it may be very tedious, the benefits of reviewing every order are many. In many cases, simply spending 10 seconds looking at an order will catch many obvious cons. For example, if the first name is something like "fasdfsdf" than you probably don't have a legitimate order. Many fraudsters are simply testing credit cards and have no intention of actually receiving merchandise. However, if not reviewed, orders like this can accidentally be shipped and the merchandise will be lost.
   
2. Watch for Tell-Tale Signs: The following are common signs of fraud:
   
3. Order has large quantities of the same item
   
4. Order has most expensive products available (they don't are about the price when its not their money)
   
5. Overnight shipping (fraudsters want to receive the order before the credit
   card is reported stolen)
   
6. Billing and Shipping name and address different from each other
   
7. USA billing address, International shipping address
   
8. Email address account from free provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc)
   

1. Block Suspicious IP Addresses: Most credit card processors provide you with the ability to block certain IP address from visitors who repeatedly are attempting credit card transactions. If the transaction meets certain criteria, you can have the visitor redirected to an error page that contains the info for your customer service.
2. Monitor Email Bounces: Most websites automatically send emails to customers once an order has been submitted. Since many fraudsters use invalid email addresses, its important to monitor which orders come back with an invalid email bounce.

It's important to take the above suggestions with caution. While all of these ideas will be helpful, you can't take any single one in isolation or you might flag a legitimate order as fraud. Usually a fraudulent order will manifest many of the above signs, not just one. The website owner must always live by the ethic that its better to mark a fraudulent order as legitimate rather than flagging a legitimate order as fraud.
While online fraud will never be fully prevented, there are many ways to mitigate it. Hopefully, the above ideas will help you filter out these annoying criminals as much as possible.
Author Bio: Justin Palmer is the Webmaster and Fraud Prevention Manager for C28 and NOTW, an online retailer of Christian T-Shirts and Christian Music CDs.