After conducting a thorough research on the global cybercrime report, we have seen that traditional and simple ways of scamming people have not changed. The majority of scams happen through email phishing and pharming followed by data breach and deformation.
These are very common and easy cyber scams where an individual can purchase a dozen private emails from the dark web and distribute tens of thousands of duplicate emails pretending to be someone else, making false claims or threatening their victims.
Cybercrime this Holiday
There is no accurate figure to put on this, but coming from personal judgement, we expect online retailers to fall victim to cybercrime the most. The reason for this is the rise in discounted sales and a push to market certain products that are associated with the holidays, furthermore an increase in online consumership.
The reason for Falling victim
The problem at hand is that many new online businesses are operating without a RiskOps team or basic cybersecurity knowledge in KYC and AML and cannot implement certain restrictions against fraudsters, hackers or scammers. During the holidays they can fall victim to simple tricks like email phishing and reverse chargebacks.
Five ways to fight cybercrime
Here are some tips that we usually recommend to everyone to be able to fight hackers, fraudsters and scammers.
Email lookup tools: this is a tool that can help lookup some details of an email user. We can get some data points such as first name, last name, validity of an email, its IP address and more.
Browser fingerprinting: This technique looks at how customers connect to your site. It’s helpful to spot suspicious logins via VPNs, proxies or emulators, but also to spot connections between accounts. A lot of fraudsters will recycle the same devices and IP addresses, so flagging them can help you take down entire fraud networks at once.
Reverse social media lookup tools: Similar to email lookup tools, social media lookup can help identify the presence and activity of someone with different social media accounts. Thanks to data breaches and dark web marketplaces, fraudsters have access to tons of credit card numbers. What they can’t do, however, is create full social media profiles to match every name on their stolen credit cards. This is a great chance to check if a user appears legitimate or not based on their social presence.
Identity Verification: This highly depends on a business itself, since it requires complex software, but face, ID, fingerprint or voice recognition can be frictionless way of identifying users in mainly SaaS related companies.
Data Enrichment: This is particularly helpful when performing a manual review – to confirm a customer’s identity before shipping a product, for example.
You can use a single data point, such as an email address or a phone number, and build a complete profile of your customers based on it. For instance, you can check if the email address is valid, whether it’s been opened with a temporary domain service or one that increases risk (no verifications during email account opening).
Final Remarks
The main issue with cybercrime is the lack of awareness and preparedness from many online businesses who went digital this year. Without the aforementioned methods of protecting yourself against fraudsters, hackers and scammers, there will always be leaked vulnerabilities that could be placed under threat.
