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What is Click Fraud?

You can find many instances of click fraud online, and these are mostly focused on the idea of someone trying to get some personal gain from a situation.

Fraud appears in many situations nowadays, so you never really know the exact extent and why it’s there in the first place. But there are many types of fraud like credit card fraud, online fraud, identity fraud, and so on.

It’s essential to try and protect yourself against attackers like this, but the reality is that since 1993, the instances of fraud, especially in the online world, has grown quite a bit. And the fraudulent persons are using a plethora of unique attack methods to make this work to their advantage.

They are trying to attack customers in a multitude of ways to gain access to their data. So trying to figure out an approach that will eliminate all those problems is super important. It will work, provided that everything is handled securely and with the utmost care and attention.

Identity Theft

This is maybe one of the more common fraud types that you can find online. Identity theft attacks tend to focus on banks, credit cards, online merchants, and so on.

The idea here thief is assuming the identity of a person to make purchases in their name. The thief doesn’t need a whole lot of information. 

Most of the time CC details, phone number, address, and name will be more than ok, and that ’s something to consider all the time. Usually, this information is acquired via phishing, where the victim downloads a maleficent file.

There are also pharming attacks where hackers send a fake website for the user to login. When the user does enter that site, he will share his login info to the attackers. That’s something significant to consider here, as proper knowledge and attention will help prevent many of these attacks powerfully and uniquely.

But malware and hacks are the most critical identity theft attacks, so try to stay away from them.

Friendly Fraud

The idea here is that the customer is trying to be fraudulent when he buys something. The idea is that the customer will buy via credit card, receive the items, and then he tries to do a chargeback. He claims that the account details were stolen or that he didn’t receive the items. Either way, this unlawful idea is very problematic, and more and more people are actively using it out there.

Which is terrible because merchants deal with a loss, and they also keep the goods or service. When a person sees something like this working, they will try to do this kind of fraud many times.

Clean Fraud

In this case, stolen credit cards are used to acquire services and goods, and then the transaction is manipulated to stay away from fraud detection. It’s sophisticated, it requires a lot of financial system knowledge, but it can be very problematic and certainly maleficent in the right hands. That’s why you need to figure out what you can do in a situation like this one.

Affiliate Fraud

Some merchants are using affiliate systems to boost their revenue and generate more sales. However, in this case, real people are using fraudulent transactions to increase the signup stats or traffic, or the process is fully automated. Sure, the numbers are high, and the affiliate that uses such fraud has to be paid, but this is just fake traffic. There’s no conversion coming from it, which means it’s a fraud design to steal money from a merchant. It’s a brilliant fraud, but still a scam nonetheless and one that will become very problematic.

Triangulation Fraud

This type of fraud is very complicated. It has 3 points. First, there’s a fake online store that will bring amazing deals and incentives for those that use a credit card. Then they will use fake credit cards to buy real items for the customers. Then they will use the stolen credit card info to make additional purchases.

The credit card number and order data can’t be connected, which makes this fraud quite problematic and hard to figure out.

Merchant Fraud

In this case, the merchant accepts the order, but he doesn’t send anything to the customers. However, he keeps the payments. You can find this in wholesale but also in retail transactions, which is a bit of a bummer most of the time. The push methods are standard here because chargebacks are not possible. The merchant will try to abuse the system as much as possible, and it will work a lot better than imagined.

Sales and Fraud Channels

Alibaba and Amazon are widely used for fraud right now as cross channels because people are more susceptible to fraud when they use these systems. Mobile customers are also dealing with fraud. That’s why you need to pay attention to what you buy and where the purchase comes from. It’s a crucial aspect to think about, and you need to handle everything adequately and in a professional manner.

If you do this properly and you take it the right way, the payoff alone can be huge. It’s a tricky thing to deal with fraud, but with the right systems in place, you might be able to eliminate that adequately.

As you can see, fraud can be very problematic, and it’s a good idea to understand the systems behind any fraudulent attacks. Once you know those, it will be a lot easier to understand the policy and improve it when needed.

Yes, it requires a lot of attention and care, yet once you have it working the way you expect, everything will work exactly as planned. Of course, new fraud attacks are coming, and you have to stay up to date with all this stuff. Otherwise, it will be hard to educate yourself against any new attacks.