For cyberfraudsters, business is booming. The FBI’s Internet Crime Report indicated that online fraud losses exceeded $16 billion in 2024, and that’s set to be topped in 2025. For businesses, protecting against fraud is absolutely crucial. Falling victim to an attack can cause catastrophic damage to a business’s reputation, its ability to operate, and its bottom line.
To make matters worse, cybercriminals are using ever-more sophisticated techniques, meaning traditional methods of fraud prevention may no longer be up to the task. If you haven’t already protected your business against fraud, now is the time to do so – before it’s too late. Keep reading to find out what the best fraud protection solutions offer, and how to choose the right one for your business.
What are Fraud Protection Services?
Fraud protection services encompass software and platforms that mitigate, detect, and prevent a variety of fraudulent activities, such as identity theft, account takeovers, and payment fraud. Such services typically deploy machine learning and AI tools, along with behavioral analytics, to keep ahead of the curve when it comes to newly emerging threats.
Any business that uses e-commerce must have robust fraud protection in place to defend both its processes and its customers’ most sensitive data.
Types of Fraud Businesses Need Protection From
There are many different types of online fraud, and new kinds are emerging constantly. It’s vital to understand these to properly protect against them. The categories below are some of the most commonly committed.
Credit Card Fraud
This type of fraud involves the unauthorized use of credit card details for withdrawals or purchases. Typical methods of credit card fraud include data breaches, phishing schemes, and the use of skimming devices. Thieves may target customer credit card information or a business’s own financial data to wreak havoc.
Identity Theft
Identity theft is when fraudsters use illegally obtained personal information for malicious activities such as the creation of new, illicit accounts or account takeover attempts. New account fraud involves a hacker using stolen personal details to create and exploit a new account, while account takeover (ATO) is where a cybercriminal accesses a user’s account using data harvested from, for example, a former data breach or phishing scam.
Online Shopping Fraud
With online shopping fraud, crooks trick users into purchasing on fake websites or revealing their personal information. Commonly used techniques include social media impersonation or phishing emails to lure customers to fake or cloned websites and purchase counterfeit products. A cloned site only needs to be online for a short time to inflict damage.
Dating/Romance Scams
This type of fraud is seriously on the rise right now, and involves fraudsters creating fake profiles on social media platforms and dating apps, fabricating personal stories, and using stolen photos to gain their victims’ trust. Once this is given, money is usually requested, often for an alleged emergency or travel expenses.
Investment Fraud
Investment fraud includes practices such as pump-and-dump and Ponzi schemes, which trick victims into investing their cash with the promise of high returns. Even seasoned investors have been known to fall foul of these nefarious activities.
Synthetic Identity Fraud
A growing type of fraud where cybercriminals create new identities by combining fake and real information. Synthetic identity fraud is difficult to detect as the identity doesn’t belong to a real person.
Why Every Business Needs Fraud Protection Services
Without a fraud protection solution in place, your business is at serious risk of significant financial loss, damage to customer trust and brand reputation, and non-compliance with data protection regulations such as CCPA and GDPR. Any business that uses e-commerce is particularly at risk, as well as those in high-risk industries, such as finance.
Fraud protection services protect both your business’s and your clients’ sensitive data, prevent the occurrence of expensive customer chargebacks, strengthen customer trust, and help keep you on the right side of the regulators.
Your business can also expect to see a drop in its operational costs by deploying an effective fraud protection solution. With less need for incident resolution and customer reimbursement, the pressure is taken off your customer service team, and you can concentrate on what matters. Further, it signals a real commitment to strong data governance, to foster long-term, robust client relationships.
Important Features You Need in a Fraud Protection Solution
Not all fraud protection solutions are the same, and it’s vital to get the best one for your business. This doesn’t just mean finding the most effective service, but identifying the one that best suits your operations, and the type of digital assets you need to protect.
Here are the features to consider when choosing a fraud protection solution for your business:
- Real-time, advanced threat detection that leverages AI tools and machine learning for adaptive, ongoing protection.
- The use of dynamic risk scoring to evaluate potentially suspicious transactions.
- Behavioral analytics should be deployed to spot anomalies.
- Adaptive authentication processes based on transaction risk.
- Tracking of user activity to detect patterns that could be the precursor to a fraud attempt.
- Scalability – it’s important that the solution can grow and develop with your business.
- How easily the service can be integrated with your processes and existing security systems.
- Customizability, to ensure it best suits your business’s industry and risk profile.
By carefully considering all these things, you’ll ensure you get the best, most effective, fraud protection solution for your needs, able to adapt as required.
Top 5 Fraud Protection Services
NICE ACTIMIZE
Best for: Businesses particularly at risk of money laundering fraud.
NICE offers comprehensive protection against financial fraud, market abuse, and money laundering threats in real time. Its case management system acts as a single point to manage security and, due to its cloud-native infrastructure, it’s highly scalable. Take advantage of NICE’s know-your-customer and trade surveillance modules, too, for deeper insights and actionable guidance.
DataDome
Best for: Businesses that want comprehensive, AI-powered fraud protection.
DataDome effective all-around solution will protect your business from a wide range of fraud, including account takeover and credential stuffing attacks. DataDome leverages powerful AI and machine learning to continuously adapt to new threats, ensuring a strong, long-term defence. The platform’s Advanced Threat Research team comprises over 30 cybersecurity experts, actively working to hunt down threats, and more than 1,000 AI modules to protect its customers from malicious agents.
Riskified
Best for: Large e-commerce platforms seeking a tailored solution.
Riskified specialises in cross-merchant insights and behavioral analytics to minimize fraud, and is good for larger e-commerce platforms that need a scalable solution. Hundreds of transactional data points are analyzed every second to offer instant approve or decline decisions, and comprehensive customer data is also provided. The service is tailored to each business’s risk profile, and it offers a chargeback guarantee for additional peace of mind.
Kount
Best for: Businesses looking for a solution that’s easy to navigate and customizable.
Kount is suitable for businesses of all sizes and is designed to build trust by accurately assessing fraud risk. It’s customizable and boasts a vast network to defend across the entire customer journey. Kount incorporates data from third parties to enhance validation, and by streamlining the manual review process, it can help your business run more smoothly, too.
Fraud Protection Solutions: The Best Way to Protect Your Business and Customers
The very best fraud protection solution will give you peace of mind that your business is protected and your customers’ data is safeguarded. Without this, your operation is at risk of serious financial consequences, regulatory fines, and severe damage to customer trust. Happily, defending against online financial fraud may be easier than you think. The solutions and services we’ve listed above are easy to implement and provide a robust defense against a range of cybercriminality. Once deployed, you can be safe in the knowledge that your business is fortified against fraud, and your customers’ information is safe.
