Retailers receive orders made to grab their property

[img_assist|nid=7378|title=|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=100|height=100]One toy shop retailer got an order from New Zealand for $1,000 lately. By some reason the retailer decided to double check. In the course of the further investigation she found out that the order was faked and the person that made it lived not in New Zealand by a long shot. The address turned out to be in Indonesia. And there were lots of credit card fraud warnings about the address and the name specified in the order.

She says: "The scary thing is that if one of my staff came in that morning, they probably would have just processed the order and shipped it out. Why wouldn't they?"

According to statistics from 2005 to 2007 about 98 Canadian businesses were victims of online or e-mail fraud, with losses ranging from $809,000 in 2005 to $558,000 in 2007. Curiously enough it is only 5 to 10 per cent of such crimes are reported.

Such online crimes are too small and sophisticated for investigation. "There are no borders on the Internet when crimes occur. The Internet is still a very hard thing to pin down. We're still having problems with jurisdiction. It's not policed," says Louis Robertson, RCMP Corporal of the Canadian anti-fraud centre PhoneBusters.

Business owners have neither refuge nor information to protect their businesses against frauds.

Online retailers are advised to determine personality of their customers not only to better serve them but to protect their business.

"In these challenging times, (retailers) will say 'I don't want to turn away sales,' yet if you're not careful you're going to be out product," states Derek Nighbor, vice-president of national affairs at the Retail Council of Canada.