Apparel Online India Magazine April 1st Issue 2019 | Page 11

WORLD WRAP
its customers were affected by the
attack. Again, in April, the commercial
website of Adidas in the US suffered a
considerable cyberattack and millions
of users were affected.
Online retailers were also not spared
either. The e-commerce behemoth
Amazon suffered a major data breach
that saw customers’ emails and
names being posted on the company’s
website shortly before Black Friday
sale. Last year in August, the online
fashion company SHEIN too became a
victim of hackers. The cyber criminals
hacked 6.42 million customers’ emails
and passwords.
Methods of scam
In 2018, account takeover increased
by 45 per cent and Forter believes
that it is gaining popularity because
stealing a user’s account is more
lucrative than usual transactional
fraud. Taking advantages of the fact
that a user pays less attention to his/
her loyalty or reward points than to
his/her bank account and credit card
statements, it becomes easier for the
criminal to shop under someone else’s
name without any recognition. ESSENTIALS
Last year, fraud calls went up
to 26 per cent, severely affecting
e-commerce merchants’ bottom lines.
Fraud techniques are ever-evolving
and online criminals are becoming
more sophisticated in their methods
and capabilities. Forter predicts
this to grow massively in 2019.
Co-ordinated action leverages the
individual skills of the members of
the group, allowing them to scale up
their attacks and strike at a higher
frequency. Typically, fraudsters
will gather personally identifiable
information, either collected from
recent data breaches, or via phishing
campaigns run by the fraud calls
themselves. Using bot attacks,
they then attempt automated mass
logins, and then attempt to make
transactions within accounts that
they have successfully logged into,
explains the report. Last year, fraud
calls went up
to 26 per cent,
severely affecting
e-commerce
merchants’ bottom
lines. Fraud
techniques are
ever-evolving and
online criminals are
becoming more
sophisticated in
their methods and
capabilities.
Conning customers by offering
them coupons and discounts and
asking them to also refer to their
friend is a type of policy abuse.
Policy abuse has recently seen a jump
of 170 per cent. The common way to
cheat the customers is by oversharing
coupons or creating multiple
accounts. The online merchants tend
to overlook this type of fraud because
transactional frauds generate greater
losses, but the staggering growth of
this fraud method demonstrates that it
is a mistake not to adopt measures to
prevent such abuse.
Another method by which the
consumers and fraudsters can cheat
the system is by abusing a store’s
return policy. According to a recent
survey conducted by the UK credit
card company Barclaycard, nearly
one in 10 shoppers admit to have
bought clothes only to take a photo
on social media. After putting their
picture on social media or on other
online forms, the consumers or the
fraudsters send the outfit back to the
store. But this is the only trick that
mostly fashion retailers are already
aware of, which is why they have
amended their policies to restrict the
number of returns per customer. And
there is a decline of 90 per cent in the
returns’ abuse.
www.apparelresources.com | APRIL 1-15, 2019 | Apparel Online India
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