“Fraudsters are innovative & persevering—money is a great motivator!"

It should come as no surprise to security-obsessed online merchants that fraud is the leading concern of e-commerce merchants polled by the Merchant Risk Council, a Seattle-based worldwide association of e-commerce payments and risk-control executives.

The MRC polled a total of 193 merchants in December and January at companies of varying industries and sizes (see their report here). 46% of all merchants surveyed cited managing e-commerce fraud as their leading concern.

“Fraudsters are innovative and persevering—money is a great motivator!—and will find new ways to defraud merchants or consumers, or find ways around existing anti-fraud/chargeback techniques, making fraud and chargeback mitigation more and more important to manage,” Gill Wells, payments and fraud manager at London-based dating social network Badoo Trading Ltd. and co-chair of the MRC’s European Advisory Board, told Digital Transactions News by email.

The second most pressing issue as cited by the survey’s respondents? IT constraints faced by IT departments as a result of management’s less-than-perfect idea of what their payment and fraud teams do.

Look for our next post on the topic of alerts and the potential impact of “false positives”…