Selling parts and accessories online is a great way to increase your parts department revenue, however, its important to protect yourself from online fraud. A few big fraud orders can really take a bite out of your profits, so constant vigilance is essential to your success.
Based on our experience helping dealers sell hundreds of millions of dollars in parts and accessories, here are some common red flags to look for:
1. Large, expensive orders are expedited
While it’s not out of the realm of possibility that someone just wants their order quickly, if a high value order is expedited and the shipping cost skyrockets, this can be a sign of a fraudulent order – criminals have a limited timeframe and want to get items with big resale value.
It’s best to be wary of orders that seem inconsistent with your normal customer activity.
2. Shipping and billing addresses don’t match
If a customer’s billing and shipping addresses differ, this is another red flag to keep an eye on. You can check residency of the delivery address to see if their name matches the occupants. It’s possible they might have recently moved.
If the delivery address is a P.O. box or non-residential address, it tends to be more suspicious.
3. Re-attempting an order with a smaller amount
A common thing that credit card thieves will do if an order gets flagged as fraud and declined is to try and place another, smaller order. This is a clue that they don’t know the limit or available balance on a card and are trying to guess.
4. Multiple orders with different payment information
This may seem a bit obvious, but if you notice that there are multiple orders placed with the same shipping information and different cards, it could very well be a sign that a thief is using various stolen cards to get the job done.
5. Customer information just seems off
Our last red flag may seem a bit broad – but there are a few things we can suggest looking for. First of all, does the customer’s name match the name on the card or account? Does the formatting seem off (are there weird hyphens, misspellings, spaces, all lowercase or uppercase typing)?
Is the email associated with an old or free domain? Common ones used for fraud include outlook.com, mail.com, or other ones that don’t exist. Emails with several random characters like carlover8812xp09@example.com is a red flag.
RevolutionParts helps dealers to significantly reduce fraudulent orders by quickly identifying many of these red flags and presenting them to you in the form of a risk score. Each order is scored using more than 25 different criteria that are known to be red flags, making it easier to identify potential risk. However, it’s not a guaranteed way to eliminate fraud. It’s important to train your team to look for other red flags.
When in doubt, trust your instincts and get extra verification before processing an order. A few steps you can take include:
Calling the customer and verifying their identity.
All you need to let the customer know is the reason for needing additional verification (large order size, shipping address concern, etc) and ask for a photo of their driver’s license. Even better is if they are willing to provide a picture of their driver’s license next to the method of payment to show they have the card in hand.
Using the built-in fraud tool on the RevolutionParts platform.
A fraud score is given, ranging from 0 (no risk) and up. Additional details are provided to allow you to see how the score was determined. You can report suspected fraud if you are unsure about an order but see a few red flags. We encourage you to only use the “known fraud” selection if you are close to 100% sure that an order is fraudulent. The fraud tool uses your feedback and this information to learn and constantly improve identifying potentially fraudulent orders.
Keep in mind that online fraud is always evolving. While we can’t stop fraud from happening, here at RevolutionParts, we are doing our best to keep our tools up to date as changes occur so that you can be proactive and take steps to prevent and report what you see.
Want more tips on how to prevent fraud? Our Account Management and Support teams are more than willing to provide additional insight. They can even give you a walk-through of the fraud prevention tools that our platform offers.
You can also access our online Knowledge Base for fraud prevention information.
We encourage you to take proactive steps to avoid online fraud – and we’re here to help!
