PayMongo joins International Fraud Awareness Week

PayMongo is an Official Supporter of the International Fraud Awareness Week to champion an important initiative by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE). #FraudWeek2020 is a global effort to mitigate the impact of fraud in online businesses by promoting anti-fraud awareness and education.

PayMongo’s goal for you, our merchants, is to maximize your growth while minimizing the risks.

PayMongo uses a powerful machine learning engine that allows us to detect and fight fraud by analyzing thousands of different combinations of signals from historical and real-time data. This enables us to predict fraud accurately and defend you against online abuse.

The PayMongo Fraud and Risk (F&R) Team is in charge of building and managing the business logic rules to automatically take action on transactions and respond to fraud attacks. We leverage on data science and analytics to determine and identify fraud patterns to implement internal risk parameters, keeping our platform safe. We recently partnered with Vesta, a leader in guaranteed fraud protection and e-commerce payment solutions, to further enhance our advanced fraud detection capabilities.

(https://finance.yahoo.com/news/paymongo-vesta-partner-offer-fraud-020000081.html)

Our shared responsibility

While PayMongo uses a sophisticated risk engine to detect possible fraudulent transactions and patterns using the available transactional data, fighting fraud is much more effective if together we – PayMongo and merchants – will work side by side to catch the fraudsters.

Fraud is our shared responsibility. On our end, we work with the data that we have and use it to further analyze each and every transaction that goes into our platform. All of the information regarding clients’ transactions and billing information are available in the PayMongo dashboard. As a merchant, you may have access to some important data or information about your customers that might not be available on PayMongo’s systems. Moreover, you have a more personal interaction with your customers and may be able to gather additional information to validate suspicious transactions.

Now that the holidays are nearing, there will undoubtedly be an influx of online transactions. There will be an urgent need to double our security against fraudulent attacks. Scammers may use the onset of heavy transaction traffic to their advantage because, it is true, they become much more difficult to detect.

Here are three simple steps you can take if you feel you are dealing with a suspicious customer and/or transactions:

1. Verify both the transactions and the customer’s identity

• Reach out to the customer personally to verify if the email provided is authentic.
• Ask for a valid identification card.
• Ask for the credit card used showing the cardholder’s name and the first 6 and last 4 digits only.
• Verify the given information by checking if the billing name matches the name in the valid ID and credit card.
• You may reach out to us at risk@paymongo.com to get an expert opinion from our Fraud and Risk team.

2. Decide your action plan

• As the merchant, you can decide whether or not to proceed with fulfilling the orders. It is your prerogative to cancel the transaction and refund the payments if you feel suspicious about the customer and the transactions. It is best to refund the unverified suspicious transactions rather than wait for it to be disputed as fraudulent.

3. Keep your documentation

• While confirming the cardholder’s identity and cards are good preemptive measures to avoid disputes, it is also advisable to keep a record of the transactions in case a cardholder decides to file a dispute with the bank.
• PayMongo’s Fraud and Risk Team may also ask for documentation in case we flag a successful transaction as high risk or if a successful transaction has an evident fraudulent pattern.
• Take note that 99.8% of fraudulent disputes that do not have proper documentation of the transaction result in loss on the part of the merchant despite having delivered the client’s purchases.
• Merchants must keep records of, but not limited to, order receipts, customer communication (email exchanges, SMS or chat conversations), shipping receipts, and/or shipment trackings showing that the products have been delivered to their customers accordingly.

With the world rapidly shifting to more online transactions, communication, exchanges and interactions, fraudsters also equip themselves with more daunting and formidable tools. What were once only meager attempts to infiltrate systems are now full blown markets and networks of businesses of like-minded cybercriminals.

Even with the most advanced systems and algorithms, there is currently no way to permanently stop fraudsters but we assure you, we can keep them at bay when we work together.

#FraudWeek2020