Card frauds: geography of crimes

Date: April 13, 2004
Source: Computer Crime Research Center
By: Dmitri Kramarenko

More than 40% of crimes related to bank cards frauds are committed by citizens of former Yugoslavia, Nigeria, Romania, Pakistan and Indonesia. Online deals contracted by these people are more often illegal, informs an MSNBC official site referring to a research made by Cybersource company. Yugoslavian residents make 13% of all fraudulent online purchases. For comparison Americans commit only 1,7% of these crimes. Many online trading companies. in order to prevent frauds committed by foreigners, prefer to make deals only in the limits of their country. A reason of such situation is that international purchases 4 times more often entail fraud.

But selling internationally isn't automatically risky. The study also showed that fraud rates among sales to New Zealand, Switzerland, Japan, France and Italy are lower than fraud rates for domestic U.S. sales.

Representatives of the Market Risks Council think that online merchants should not entirely neglect international trade. "Our recommendation is you should always ship internationally," said Julie Ferguson, a council board member. "But if you are shipping to a higher risk location you ought to mark it for review."

Many online merchants just avoid global sales all together. A full one-third of medium and large Web sites simply won't sell to international customers, according to a separate recent survey, conducted by Cybersource. International fraud rates are four times higher than domestic rates, the company says.

Despite the high risk of selling overseas -- better than 1 in 10 purchases made from Romania are fraudulent, for example -- the Merchant Risk Council says electronic commerce Web sites shouldn't shy away from the potential revenue source. The council is a consortium of 1,500 companies that do business on the Web.

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2005-09-02 03:53:00 - Very nice Gergana

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