The Internet can be a dangerous place where cybercriminals can steal one’s money, passwords, and even identity. E-commerce fraud is one of the most serious concerns when it comes to online scams. Consumers are the victims of most e-commerce fraud incidents, ranging from credit card fraud to bogus returns. Because of the safety and convenience of these platforms, as many Filipinos continue to stay indoors or strive to live under the “new normal,” there has been an increase in the adoption of digital banking and financial services.
With the significant increase in digital fraud in the country, Filipino consumers need to be warier of the people they interact and transact with online, especially when money is involved. Not only should they protect their financial information, but they should also be wary of people asking for personal information such as their phone numbers, email addresses or ID numbers,” said the Country Director for the Philippines, of a cross-border digital payments company.
“Over the past year, we have seen accelerated growth in the use of digital methods of making payments as well as sending and receiving remittances. But the current trend that we are seeing infers that the increase would likely continue beyond the pandemic,” he added. They have seen consistent, double-digit growth month-on-month since it opened international transfers to domestic mobile wallets.
Nevertheless, as the amount of money circulating in the digital sphere grows, so does the number of fraud cases. As per a study released in March 2021 by global insights company, 44% of Filipino consumers were targeted by digital fraud attempts in the previous three months, while enterprises saw a 315 increase in fraud attempts compared with the previous year. As the majority of financial and shopping activity moves online, he urges Filipinos to be cautious not only of the people they encounter online but also of the platforms and websites with which they transact.
Credit card fraud, identity theft, chargebacks, and bogus returns are the most common types of e-commerce themes. These have an impact on both consumers and merchants. Late-night orders, dropbox addresses, items listed for sale outside of the country, express shipping, free/anonymous email services, high dollar orders, and cases where the “ship to” address differs from the billing address are all red flags of possible fraud.
Consumers can protect themselves from e-commerce fraud by doing the following:
- Shopping at secure websites
- Doing research on the website before they place the order
- Reading the site’s policies on privacy and security
- Being mindful of cookies
- Never give out your social security number
Merchants can reduce fraud by:
- Verifying a cardholder’s info
- Using transaction controls
- Maintaining an internal negative file
- Implementing a transaction data field
OpenGov Asia reported that an international tech giant behemoth has unveiled details of its upcoming AI-powered chip designed to bring deep learning inference to enterprise workloads to help address fraud in real-time, to identify and stop a variety of fraud attacks and crime quickly and accurately – while improving customer and citizen experiences.
The new chip has an innovative centralised design that enables clients to use the full power of the AI processor for AI-specific workloads, making it ideal for financial services workloads such as fraud detection, loan processing, trade clearing and settlement, anti-money laundering, and risk analysis. The chip has 8 processor cores with a deep superscalar out-of-order instruction pipeline and a clock frequency of more than 5GHz, which is optimised for the demands of heterogeneous enterprise-class workloads.
“Consumers should think first before they click on a link, or before signing up for a financial service or an online shopping website. The more discerning users get, unfortunately, the more deceptive fraudulent activities get as well,” he added. He went on to say that Filipinos should avoid third-party intermediaries or those who offer to make transactions on their behalf, and instead only transact with trustworthy platforms that offer security measures to prevent fraud and other malicious activities.
