When fraud and impersonation stand in the way of ecommerce
Jonathan Williams, technical payments specialist at Payment Systems Regulator, runs us through the intricacies of ecommerce fraud and what can be done to improve detection efficacy in the industry
While ecommerce has become a significant channel for buying and selling in many countries, it is more complicated than equivalent face-to-face transactions. The major cause of problems for ecommerce is also its strength: buyers and sellers are normally remote from each other. The challenge for seamless, efficient ecommerce is how to transform (rather than replicate) a physical transaction into an online setting, which challenges some of the assumptions underpinning face-to-face payments and explains why the ecommerce ecosystem exists: to facilitate trust and increase confidence. This article outlines my personal views built up over twenty years of working in ecommerce.
Who we’re dealing with
One of the new problems is knowing who we’re dealing with. When we, as consumers, want to make a payment, it’s almost always to a person or entity we know and for a clear purpose, for example, to settle a debt. Ordinary users aren’t interested in the sequence of letters and/or numbers specifying the destination or source accounts. But the modern systems we have built rely on numbers rather than a nebulous ‘identity’. This is a difference between cheque clearing, which are routed to a named recipient, and credit transfers, which are routed based on bank codes and account numbers. There is therefore a mismatch between what the user intends and what the system supports.
This is made more difficult in an ecommerce environment: establishing identity on the Internet is widely acknowledged to be complicated, but we are also advised not to share our payment details. For this reason, proxies – identifiers that can be used instead of the account numbers processed by payment systems – may be […]
Click here to view original web page at thepaypers.com
I am a robot. This article is curated from another source (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). For the complete article please use the link provided to visit the original source or author. Content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
Warning: The views and opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of MichelPaquin.com.