Buy online, pick up in-store fraud spikes

A new benchmark study from ACI Worldwide revealed a spike in fraud attempts involving the buy online pick up in-store (BOPIS) channel during the 2018 peak holiday season, suggesting merchants and their service providers need to up their games to control omnichannel fraud.

Fraud attempts on BOPIS transactions jumped 13 percent between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve, and peaked at 20 percent in the days just before Christmas, ACI reports. The company's insights came from an analysis of millions of merchant transactions, including card payments made at some leading global retail brands.

Fraudsters are gaining access to credit card information from hackers, like those behind the high-profile hacks of Marriott, Equifax and Target, explained Erika Dietrich, global director for global risk at ACI.

"As chip-and-PIN credit cards are harder for fraudsters to replicate, it is driving them towards card-not-present, cross-channel fraud," said Dietrich. "For example, fraudsters can use stolen credit card information to make a card-not-present transaction online and then simply walk in and pick-up the item in-store. We'll see this trend continue to grow in coming years, and merchants will need to pay more attention to their omni-channel fraud controls," she added.

Overall, card transactions during the 2018 holiday season outpaced those recorded in 2017. "We saw genuine consumer transactions outpace fraudulent transactions this holiday season as the market has matured," Dietrich said.

The total volume of purchases during the 2018 holiday shopping season rose 16 percent, while the overall value of those transactions grew by 9 percent compared to the same period in 2017, according to ACI's analysis.

The three largest daily increases in transaction volumes were recorded on Thanksgiving Day (when transactions were up 19 percent over 2017) Black Friday (20 percent) and Cyber Monday (9 percent). Overall fraud attempts on those days actually fell compared to the same days in 2017, however. The volume of overall fraud attempts on Thanksgiving Day fell to 1.24 percent of all transactions from 1.83 percent in 2017. On Black Friday they fell to 1.30 percent from 1.59 percent in 2017, and on Cyber Monday overall fraud attempts were 0.84 percent of transactions, down from 1.28 percent in 2017, ACI said.

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