Fraud is defined when it comes to retail as: “A transaction that is not authorized by a customer is referred to as fraudulent.”
There has been a lot of devastating experiences by customers with regards to fraud. A lot of victims suffered the consequences through a lot of lost time and money which can lead to bankruptcy.
Whether on retail business, primarily e-commerce or if you’re operating one or more brick-and-mortar locations, fraud is really an inevitable reality for merchants. Stolen merchandise and false transactions will cost a lot of money, cause unnecessary complications to maintain and track inventory, and lots of added stress.
For you to be more aware, here we will discuss some a particular type and modus of fraud so you can be alert and more cautious about the happenings in your business.
So, if you are more on the online transactions, there are two main types of fraud that can be identified — chargeback fraud and card-testing fraud. We will explain this as: “Chargeback fraud involves purchases that are reported as never delivered and then charged back to the merchant by the credit card company. While card-testing fraud happens when thieves with a list of stolen card numbers essentially ‘play the slots’ by attempting purchase after purchase from an online store with different numbers until they find a card number that succeeds.
So how can you save yourself from this? Let us help you with it.
Prevention of In-Store Fraud
Now you know the some types of fraud and that there are more out there, you need to equip yourself with the right tools and training to protect your business from it. Here’s what you can do to prevent fraud at your brick-and-mortar locations.
Monitoring your Returns Carefully
Beware of Falsified returns — in the form of gift receipts, gift card returns, and returning stolen merchandise with a false or stolen receipt for this makes up a large portion of in-store scams. You can save yourself if you have intensive monitoring your returns for repeat offenders, spikes in frequency, and abnormal data can curb these frauds.
Training Your Frontliners
Your best weapon against fraud is your employees. If they have proper training and education, your employees will feel empowered and eager to flag things that seem wrong and take action to protect your business from scams. Without a plan in place, employees may feel freer to do things like give away discounts to those who don’t qualify for them or even tamper with registers. This is where most of the businesses get victimized.
While loss prevention can be a tough topic to tackle and implement, it’s crucial to make sure that all employees and company policies are on the same page.
On your way in making your business and revenues safer there are a lot of things to keep in mind. This is just necessary because you really need to be careful in what you are doing. We hope that this was helpful to you and we hope for the best for your business.