Why retail businesses are the most common targets of fraud

What percentage of adults would stop doing business with an organisation if it was hacked?*

In today’s digitally-connected world, consumers love the speed and convenience of frictionless payments, and the growth of online and mobile purchases has increased significantly over the past few years.

However, did you know that financial fraud losses surged by 26% year-on-year in 2015, with financial institutions stating that payment card fraud is the most generic form of fraud? In 2015, £755m worth of losses were recorded in the UK retail sector.

The cost of fraud is undeniably high, with the annual bill for UK retail crime reaching £613m in 2015. Retailers are one of the most common targets for cybercriminals, as data breaches have resulted in scams and fraudulent transactions increasing over the past few years.

Fraudsters are strategically targeting retail checkouts, with nearly three times as many attacks on retailers than elsewhere in the financial services sector. Loss of personal information from merchants more than doubled from 2014 to 2016.

Verifone’s latest whitepaper outlines how retailers can clamp down on retail fraud, the key ways to optimise mobile and online transactions and how to create easy integration across multiple platforms.

Merchants and consumers need to be informed and aware of the potential breaches to their infrastructure, as well as creating a secure online presence to keep up with the rise of online spending.

Foregenix, the global leaders in data forensics and information security, identified that the three most common types of cyber attacks are: Targeted malware, application vulnerability exploits and structured query language (SQL) injection.

Click here to download your complimentary copy of the whitepaper

*The answer is 75%.

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