Importance of Fraud Prevention for Business Startups

  • Fraud Prevention

Starting a business today is no easy task, even for the most business savvy individuals.As we all know, more and more businesses are creating an online presence and allowing consumers to purchase goods online; most startups are skipping the brick and mortar phase and going straight to an online environment from traffic schools, ecommerce, colleges/universities, payday loans, insurance companies, gaming, and so on.Online, businesses are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year (being closed is simply unacceptable) and gone are the days of getting to personally know your customers or even seeing your customers.Businesses must take action not only protect themselves from intrusions and attacks, but also protect their customers by implementing fraud prevention measures and ultimately saving them money by preventing chargebacks.

In a recent study performed by Javelin Strategy, the incidents of fraud increased 13% over the previous year and that figure is most likely to trend in the upcoming years.The same study also mentioned social behaviors on social networking sites and how easy it is to obtain personal information such as dates of birth, pets names, vehicles (make and color), schools attended, and so on.Many businesses are still making use of whats known as static KBA (knowledge based authentication) or shared secrets which are questions the customer answers upon account creation such as: name of pet, name of favorite vacation spot, and name of first boyfriend/girlfriend; these types of questions are no longer a true form of authentication due to individuals sharing this information on social media websites.

At EVS, we know fraud prevention and have been effectively fighting fraud for over 13 years.We offer what is known as dynamic KBA (knowledge based authentication), which is a real-time authentication tool in which questions are created on the fly and clients can present the questions to their customers.The KBA questions are designed to be non-intrusive in nature and easy for the true ID holder to answers; however, would stump an identity thieve.

EVS understands the challenges business startups face and identity theft should not be one of them.Give us a call today and find out how EVS can assist you in your fight against fraud.


[Contributed by Eric Knapp, VP of Client Services]