How Much Fraud On Record-Breaking Cyber Monday?

The Washington Post reports that this holiday season, Cyber Monday expanded into an entire week of record-breaking online shopping. From Sunday, November 27 through Saturday, December 3, consumers spent nearly $6 billion over the Internet, a 15% increase over the same week in 2010. During the first 32 days of the November-December holiday season, online spending had already reached $18.7 billion, also a 15% increase from last year.

Which begs the question: when the dust settles, how much of this uptick in online sales will equate to online fraud? It is inevitable that some consumers will detect unauthorized charges on their credit and bank accounts, and many retailers will suffer high chargebacks.

Consumers should seek out and patronize businesses that implement a comprehensive, in-depth approach to protecting customers from identity theft and financial fraud. They should also check credit and banking statements carefully, scrutinize each and every charge, and call their bank or credit card company immediately to refute any unauthorized transactions.

Retailers should consider adding device identification technology to prevent more crime upfront before product ships and stolen credit cards are charged. This emerging technology examines the PC, smartphone, or tablet being used to conduct an online transaction in order to determine whether the device’s characteristics, behavior, and history indicate a high level of risk. The leading provider of device identification and device reputation services is iovation Inc. Take a look at iovation’s stats from Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Fraud analysts from online retailers around the world interact with iovation’s database of device intelligence daily, and through sharing information and running real-time risk assessments, they block millions of online fraudulent attempts each year.

Robert Siciliano, personal security and identity theft expert contributor to iovation, discussesCyber Monday on Fox Boston. Disclosures