Dallas, TX (PRWEB) June 01, 2011

Fraudulent orders have plagued online retailers since the first e-commerce site was created decades ago, resulting in billions of dollars in losses for online merchants. The good news is that due to ever-evolving fraud risk tools available to merchants, online fraud has decreased over the past several years. The better news is some merchants, such as OfficeSuppliesLane.com, are not resting on their laurels.

OfficeSuppliesLane.com, an online retailer of office supplies, office furniture, and janitorial supplies, proactively pursues online criminals who attempt to use stolen credit cards at their site. On fraudulent orders, OfficeSuppliesLane.com reports shipping- and IP addresses to banks and local police departments, as well as to the legitimate card holders whenever possible. They have even bartered with private investigators to gather more information on credit card thieves who attempt to use another’s credit card at OfficeSuppliesLane.com without permission from the cardholder.

“According to The Merchant Risk Council, online merchants lose about 1.2 per cent of annual revenues to fraud, totaling nearly three billion dollars in 2010,” said Linda O’Neill, president of OfficeSuppliesLane.com.

While fraud risk tools available to merchants have come a long way with device fingerprinting, fraud detection software, and other tools, cyber-thief techniques are evolving too.

“A few years ago, the red flags on swindlers were blatant,” said O’Neill. “High-dollar, high-tech items were being ordered with expedited shipping. Today, thieves have smartened up a bit, choosing low fraud items and ground shipping to establish trust, or just to 'test' the credit card, and then try to hit you with a big order—hoping to sneak one past us. We stay one step ahead of them and haven’t paid any chargebacks in over a year, despite receiving orders with stolen credit cards on a daily basis.” A chargeback is the process where a card holder disputes a charge and has their issuing bank pull the funds (charge back) from the merchant while the transaction is investigated.

As rampant as online fraud still is today, O’Neill and her team have found banks and police departments across the country more welcoming of her calls than in the past.

“Many of our fellow online merchants have been put out of business because of online scams,” said O’Neill. “It just takes one order that’s too good to be true to send you to bankruptcy court. Due diligence is the name of the game, even more so now in these tough economic times.”

Based in Dallas TX., OfficeSuppliesLane.com is an online only retailer of discount office products. They have been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, The Dallas Business Journal, and several other publications.

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