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Education

Help merchants keep travel sales 1. Synthetic IDs: Synthetic IDs are
fraudulent identities developed
sky high and fraud grounded by criminals who take legitimate
pieces of personal information
from various individuals and com-
By Don Bush bine them into a new, hybrid iden-
Kount Inc. tity that only exists in the virtual
world. Fraudsters then use this
hile spring weather could not be more different from coast to info to open new, fraudulent bank
coast (with the East Coast pummeled by a springtime blizzard, or credit card accounts, which they
while the West Coast went full-on summer mode with 80 degrees then use for booking travel. With
W and sunshine), consumers across the country do have one thing the influx of data breaches noted
in common – summer travel booking. As travel merchants prepare for an influx by Kount in March 2017, http://blog.
of sales, they need to be prepared for the potential pitfalls that might follow: kount.com/blog-against-fraud/its-not-
fraud and chargebacks. you-its-data-breach-déjà-vu, fraud-
sters have even more information
With Forbes Media LLC reporting in January 2017 that 42 percent of Americans at their disposal to create a stock-
plan to take a vacation this year, it's important for merchants to be on top of pile of synthetic IDs.
their game when it comes to beating fraud.
In order to combat this, business-
Opportunistic attackers often capitalize on busy periods of increased activity, es need to make sure their fraud
hoping overloaded businesses and preoccupied consumers will let their guard prevention system is monitoring
down. And fraudsters are only becoming savvier, preying on travel sites with all aspects of an order: names,
new threats, while businesses are still trying to catch up to last year's schemes. addresses, email addresses and
credit card information should all
Three major threats to travel sites match up across the board. If the
same address or credit card num-
Following are three significant threats affecting travel businesses this year, bers are being used across mul-
along with ways your merchant customers can combat each: tiple accounts or names, that's a
huge red flag.

2. Loyalty fraud: Criminals aren't
just after credit card numbers and
personal information; anything
of monetary value is fair game,
including your customers' loyalty
accounts. Loyalty fraud tends to
work along the same lines as card-
not-present fraud, with account in-
formation accessed through a mix-
ture of phishing scams, identity
theft, and hacking weak and vul-
nerable passwords. Once control
of an account is taken, fraudsters
can hijack your loyal customers'
points, emptying their accounts
through any of the company's re-
demption options.

Remind your customers that their
loyalty accounts should be treated
like cash or sensitive credit card
information and monitored often.
Travel companies must also keep
a close eye on loyalty point trans-
actions just as they do traditional
transactions, which have the same
signs of fraud including: different
addresses, different Internet ser-

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