Ecommerce fraud analysts share tips online retailers can implement to help verify legitimate transactions and block fraudulent ones.

Criminals trying to steal goods from online retailers is not going away.

“The fraudster will never go away,” says Chad Funk, a fraud analyst at sports shoe and apparel manufacturer BrooksRunning.com. “They will pick on someone until they find someone who is not fighting back hard enough.”

Fraud prevention vendor Signifyd finds that the number of transactions it deemed as fraud increased 34% in 2022 compared with 2021, based on its client data.

Below, a few merchants share ways they’ve learned to manage ecommerce fraud on their sites and verify legitimate transactions.

1. Personal details accuracy and speed

For the majority of online transactions, a shopper needs to provide her name and billing address. These details are ingrained in most people, and they can quickly type them without any mistakes.

If one of these details is a mistake, it could imply ecommerce fraud, as the criminal is more likely to make a transposition error than the real person, who knows these details instantly and can type them in a few seconds, says Andrei Ialama, chief operating officer at Paybis. Paybis is an online platform that allows shoppers to buy cryptocurrency with credit and debit cards.

What’s more, a fraud prevention technology system can provide retailers with guidance on how long an average person in an average age group, by device, would take to input these details. Anything slower would be red flag, as a criminal could be copying it over, whereas the real customer would know their own details and input them quickly, Ialama says. While this is not true all the time, it does increase the likelihood of fraud, he says.

2. Velocity at which an IP address changes