Cybercriminals Target Merchants More Aggressively During Pandemic

No doubt, the 2020 pandemic has sparked an eCommerce and online-shopping explosion. Movement restrictions pushed many customers worldwide to place their first order online, and internet shopping freaks to buy more online.

And while more traffic and purchases are a good sign for merchants, cybercriminals are silently plotting and stealing from unsuspecting businesses and their customers.

At this pace, it isn’t an overstatement to say that the fraud rate in eCommerce is competing with its growth rate.

Cases like account takeovers and fraudulent chargebacks topped the list of notorious scams in the heat of Corona. But account takeover is “the number 1 fraud trend,” according to Jef Wixted, the VP of Marketing at Accertify Inc.

Accertify, a daughter internet-fraud safety firm to American Express Co., feels the pandemic-induced rise in data breaches has provided fraudsters with the info they need to take over different accounts.

“The situation worsened with the movement restrictions that pushed many customers worldwide to place their first orders online and internet shopping freaks to buy more online,” explains Wixted.

Fraudsters Targeting Unsuspecting Digital First-Timers

According to Julie Conroy, a fraud expert at Aite Group, the festive season may mark the peak of account takeover scams.

The whole new audience of digital first-timers (welcomed amid COVID-19) are prone to social-engineering schemes and may ultimately suffer account takeovers, she says.  Add to the fact that financial firms have eased some rules & dollar caps on services like P2P payments (to accommodate as many consumers as possible) and cybercriminals stand a chance.

As we speak, Conroy says, “There has been a surge in phishing scams. The syndicates have all the tools they need to carry out successful account takeover attacks. Phishers trick internet users into revealing important confidential data like their passcodes and usernames.

As soon as Covid-19 restrictions tightened, fraudsters swung into action. According to a Q3 Fraud & Abuse Report by Arkose Labs, attack attempts on logins increased 28 percent in Q2. Other findings show fraud attempts on account registrations reduced 30 percent and 47 percent on payments.

Why The Increase In Account Takeovers?

Cybercriminals are also leveraging tech speed up their account takeover schemes. Cloud capabilities and SaaS solutions have particularly played a significant role in decentralizing computing functions.

“In the past, it took a team of fraudsters to take over an account,” says Wixted. Today, however, a criminal can leverage cloud capabilities and execute everything alone, he clarifies. They do this by renting software for unscrupulous uses and then ditch it.

¨The increasing takeover of accounts has been fueled by the numerous data attacks leaking user login credentials, bad password habits and ground-breaking technologies,” Wixted concludes

Author Bio: Payment industry guru Taylor Cole is a passionate payments expert who understands the complex world of best merchant services UK. He also writes non-fiction, on subjects ranging from personal finance to stocks to cryptopay. He enjoys eating pie with ice-cream on his backyard porch, as should all right-thinking people.