4 Ways to Outsmart Fraudsters This Holiday Season

1. Fraudsters love when retailers offer express shipping. The faster they receive the goods, the harder it is for retailers to track or recover the merchandise. Monitor your express shipping transactions more closely. In particular, be on the lookout for orders that have different "sold to" and "ship to" addresses. This is a sign that a crook may be using a stolen credit card.
2. Consider implementing device intelligence software, which looks at the computer used by a customer when making a transaction. Device intelligence software can determine if a customer's computer is in Nigeria, for instance, and not San Francisco where the customer says he or she is. Hiding true location is a common tactic of online fraudsters; device intelligence can be a helpful fraud-spotting tool.
3. Leverage address standardization/validation software. These products can help you ensure that the address you're shipping to is valid. The software can also help reduce the cost of having a shipping company redirect packages.
4. Monitor not only sales and web traffic, but also why credit cards are declined. If there's an increase in hard declines, especially "pick up" related declines, those transactions need to be monitored and reviewed more carefully.

Connie Spencer-Adams is vice president of service delivery with Verifi, a hosted payments technology company that provides fraud and risk mitigation solutions to retailers. Connie can be reached at connie.spencer-adams@verifi.com.