Address verification to curb fraudulent purchases

Over the past few years, the e-commerce industry has gained quite a fame in the digital world. The reason is the growing customer demand for convenience and time-saving shopping experience. Due to online shopping sites, the customers can get items delivered to their doorsteps just with few taps and without leaving their place. Moreover, the businesses are exploring another platform to expand their business, target more customers, and add more value to their business.

However, with the retailers marking their online presence and the growing trend of online shopping, there is another type of entity - con artists - looking out more opportunities to fulfill their malicious intent. If on the one hand, it has unveiled a handy shopping experience for the customers, then, on the other hand, the ineffective security checks, are paving ways for fraudsters to exploit the platform and carry on fraud. These security checks include authentication checks, address verification, and identity verification during checkout.

Fraudulent purchases - A significant e-commerce fraud

Fraudulent purchases from a customer account are emerging as a significant type of e-commerce fraud that is causing a hefty loss to the businesses in the form of chargebacks. Due to inefficient identity verification checks in place, the troublemaker accesses the user accounts and makes fraudulent purchases, getting the items delivered to some new address. Since the whole process works inflow, the sites even ship the products to a new address without properly checking if that address belongs to the particular user account or not. This, later on, results in chargebacks when the user reports the fraudulent purchase and unauthorized use of card from their account.

Moreover, there’s another case where the authorized users are the ones who make fraudulent purchases. Some bad customers make accounts on the site just to get free items or credit as a result of fraudulent purchases. What they do is purchase items, pay for them and get it delivered to some other address. In this way, they not only get items but also claim a chargeback stating their card was misused by someone else and also the items are shipped to some other place. In this situation; the company has to bear the loss of chargebacks as well as the shipped items. This is the result of the business’s inability to online address verification. Only if they verify the address before dispatching the order such frauds can be avoided.

Address verification services securing E-commerce

Modern problems require modern solutions. To secure e-commerce sites and prevent various types of digital frauds, there is a dire need for effective and efficient verification solutions. Online address verification service is one of the modern-business solutions that facilitate the e-commerce industry to verify and authenticate the addresses of the customer in order to prevent wrong shipments and fraudulent purchases. These services don’t rely on the customer’s honesty to verify their identity, instead, they require solid residential and identity proof in the form of identity documents and utility bills to authenticate the customer provided information.

Moreover, there are some cases in which customers want their products to be delivered to some other address. That case may pose a potential threat of fraud that the account is taken over by the third person. So in that case, businesses can perform address verification by asking the customers for identity proof. Different identity verification services such as document verification and face verification can be incorporated at the checkout process to ensure that the authorized customer is the one making a purchase.

All this verification is done in real-time that ensures the remote presence of the customer. In case of failed verification, the checkout process is stopped mid-way combatting the troublemakers.