3 Ways to Fight Retail Fraud Without Alienating Customers
By Matthew Startup, Marketing –
With mobile commerce on the rise, retailers need to learn how to protect themselves and their customers.
Mobile shopping is rapidly becoming more popular each year. Many people have smart phones that can easily browse a retailer’s products or services, making mobile technology a blessing and a curse for retailers.
Retail fraud has caused billions in losses annually the past few years. Retailers love to provide their customers with easy access to their products and they don’t want to get left behind in the technology race. But is it worth it to the retailer to go through the hassle of dealing with the level of fraud and monetary losses? Theoretically, if customers can help lower the cost of doing business by helping prevent fraud, retailers can lower prices
Retailers want to make mobile commerce (m-commerce) as easy as possible for the customer, but that also might make their servers more susceptible to outside influences. Most of the time, criminals attempt to illegally hack in and steal information.
Solution 1: Device Data
One solution would be to ask customers to provide retailers with more personal information about their devices. Oddly enough, increased information could lower fraud occurrences. However, people like their privacy, making this less of a viable option.
Solution 2: Mobile Data
Financial institutions tend to lump mobile channel fraud together with the online channel data, making it difficult to keep tabs on just how much fraud is happening. If they make this type of fraud data more of a priority, it will help companies have the information they need to make educated decisions.
Solution 3: High-tech Security
Many new smart phones today have biometric scanners. If these become a little more common, requiring a fingerprint from the customer before transactions would solve many issues.
Most of these solutions may not occur in the near future. It may take time for retailers and financial institutions to get their acts together.
Corporations and government agencies alike have challenges with data security and hackers. Sometimes data loss occurs due to an insider stealing or divulging the information.
To protect against this type of data insecurity, organizations could use ongoing employee evaluations to ensure information integrity. One new solution that could be used is EyeDetect®.
EyeDetect is a new lie detection technology that can identify deception and fraud in individuals with 85 percent accuracy. The behavior of the eyes reflects signs of stress and deception that are undetectable by other people. With the use of this innovative lie detection technology, corrupt employees or suspects can be caught based on completely unbiased mathematical data generated from the behavior of their eyes.
