Fraud is something every eCommerce store is dealing with. There are plenty of automated solutions that promise to help decrease fraud but none are actually free and you might not afford any of them in the beginning.
I’m going to share with you a very simple, tried & tested, solution to help decrease the number of fraudulent orders you get on your site. The best part, it’s free!
What is it and how does it work?
The trick is an email designed to scare fraudsters and their networks away from your eCommerce store.
A little bit of context…
As you know, Online Marketing often interacts with the Customer Support Department.
Clients have asked me many times to review fraud and propose solutions and they were constantly complaining about fraudsters to the extent that it was limiting my ability as a marketer to work (i.e. I don’t want to sell gift cards because I’m afraid of credit card fraud).
I will admit that I became annoyed with how many fraudulent cases exist and could not understand why clients in the U.S. suffered the most from this.
The AHA Moment
I started researching and came across the FBI Cyber Crime page, which further took me to the Internet Crime Complaint Center.
The client was dealing with a pretty big loss due to a charge-back from a fraudulent order and I asked him why not make a complaint and email the fraudster.
Customer support then sent out an email to the fraudster where they alerted him/her that a complaint had been made.
Next thing you know, the number of fraud orders on the site dropped even though we were in peak season. We figured that the fraudster alerted his ring of “colleagues” and blacklisted that merchant. Ever since I’ve been advising clients to have their support send out something like the below email to potential fraudsters and got great feedback over, and over, again.
Mr./Mrs. X,
Your order has triggered our internal fraud filters and we have put it on hold. Please reach out to us as soon as possible so we can gather more data. We would like to file a complaint with the Internet Crime Complaint Center (Internet Crime Complaint Center) and we could use your help in getting more information.
Your security is our top priority and we take matters like this very seriously.
Thank you so much for your cooperation.
Of course the above is a bluff, the fraudster will never get back to you, but should he read the email, he will most likely move forward to the next victim because most of the time, victims do not talk back.
Let me know in the comments section below of interesting ways in which you combat fraud or if you tried the above and found it useful.