Fraud is hardly a new phenomenon in retail — in fact, it is probably safe to assume that fraud in some form or other has been there since the beginning. The minute the first shop opened for business, some fraudster likely got the idea to devise a scheme to take something from that shop without having to pay for it. Fraud, in some sense, is, was and always will be a cost of doing business in the world of retail.
But fraud in the last decade during the rise of digital sales has become something quite different than it ever has been. In the good old days of brick-and-mortar, a fraud was limited by proximity — to defraud a merchant, they had to visit the merchant’s establishment. In the era of eCommerce worldwide, a fraudster with a boosted payments credential can appear on one’s digital doorstep ready to defraud from just about any place on the planet.
And, as Visa’s CyberSource Vice President Andrew Naumann told Karen Webster in a recent conversation, fraudsters these days aren’t limiting themselves to the biggest online targets — they’re going after small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) as well.
“What we’ve seen is that fraud has gone mainstream,” Naumann said. “This isn’t just a problem limited to the biggest players, this is [small] and medium-sized businesses that are now targets, which means that there is a level of awareness in place that I would say wasn’t there five years ago.”