Ice.com continues to make improvements to lower its exposure to potentially fraudulent transactions during the holiday shopping season. As a result, the online jewelry retailer has reduced its overall charge back rate to well under 1%, Ezzie Schaff, vice president of risk management, tells InternetRetailer.com.
Ice.com has doubled the number of employees it has assigned to tracking down and trouble-shooting fraudulent transactions, though Ice won’t release any specifics.
Ice.com, No. 178 in the Internet Retailer Top 400 Guide to Retail Web Sites, is also making more efficient use of its existing risk management tools such as using services and software that help to correctly identify the cardholder before completing a transaction. For instance, identification software linked to public databases gives Ice.com at least three different questions it can ask a customer to help verify their cardholder information. “We’ve gotten smarter at using these programs,” Schaff says. “We’ve had far fewer problems with fraud or risk when we take additional steps to verify the cardholder’s information.”
This holiday season Ice.com says criminals are getting very sophisticated in their efforts to try and commit fraud. Among the new trends are bogus customers from overseas, particularly Nigeria and Ghana, using hard-to-verify IP addresses to try to make an illegal purchase. Other criminals are using caller relay to attempt unauthorized purchases.
For instance, caller relay makes it harder for an online retailer to call and verify a customer’s cardholder and shipping address, Schaff says. To combat holiday fraud, Ice.com is using its risk management tools and databases to create graphs and baselines its customer service employees can use as a screening tool to prevent fraud. “If a transaction is high or low of a certain baseline, it helps raise a red flag and alerts the employee,” Schaff says. “We’ve built them for various higher risk products such as watches. Depending on the baseline reading we will know better if we are dealing with a possible high-risk transaction.”
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