Ecommerce fraud will cost internet retailers approximately $3.6 billion this year, according to the latest statistics.
This represents a 20 per cent rise in the last 12 months, despite only a marginal increase in the number of incidences of fraud, reports the security firm CyberSource, which was responsible for the research.
The percentage of revenue lost to internet scams actually remained steady at 1.4 per cent, reflecting the ongoing growth of the ecommerce industry.
Online stores halted approximately 4.2 per cent of orders made in 2007 due to fraud fears, while an additional 1.3 per cent of transactions were fraudulent. US companies operating via the internet now typically review 27 per cent of deals, up from 23 per cent last year.
Orders from overseas are more than 2.8 times more likely to be fraudulent than transactions from within the US, CyberSource found.
The most popular tools used to prevent fraud include address verification, card number verification and company-specific screening. The largest online retailers use eight fraud-screening methods each, on average.
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