Charities "are soft targets for online criminals"
Howard Lake | 20 October 2004 | News
ClearCommerce Europe Ltd, the fraud prevention and payment processing solutions provider, reports that charities are being targeted for online fraud, as criminals test stolen cardholder details on unsuspecting Web sites to ensure the cards are fully operational.
Alan Smith, business development director of ClearCommerce Europe said: “fraudsters are donating money online or purchasing goods from online charity shops as a way to confirm the credit/debit card details are accurate.
“Most charities do not have secure risk management/payment processing tools in place, so fraudsters can go unnoticed making repeat donations until they are sure the cardholder details are correct. This information is then used by criminals to rob online retailers in large scale strikes.
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“To prevent this from happening, charities must report any unusual activity to the police.”
ClearCommerce Europe has issued a warning to charities, retailers, banks and consumers ahead of the Christmas purchasing rush.
ClearCommerce’s anti-fraud tools are in use by a range of US non-profits: 175 of online fundraising solutions provider Convio’s 300 non-profit clients employ the tools on their Convio-powered Web sites.
Dr. David Crooke, Convio co-founder and CTO commented: “Although our clients can’t be defrauded of merchandise online, we use ClearCommerce FraudShield to help prevent our clients’ Web sites from being abused by would-be fraudsters. Because non-profit groups don’t have the resources to manually review suspicious transactions the way large e-commerce companies do, it’s essential for us to have access to technology that can make automated, real-time anti-fraud decisions to prevent bad transactions from getting into the system in the first place, and to avoid the administrative cost of reversing them.”
In fact, charities have been targeted for some years by would-be fraudsters. This issue has been highlighted at a number of public talks and training sessions, and a Christian Aid staff member with strong experience in this area contributed advice to the Institute of Fundraising’s code of practice on Internet fundraising in 2001.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.