FRAUD

Once you receive an order and accept payment, the first step is to examine the order and payment to make sure everything is complete, and accurate. Online sales are ripe for fraud because the person committing it feels safe and is never seen. You never really know exactly who you are selling to so it's important to take the information you do have and use it to the best of your ability.

If you provide an email address on your website, you will get emails from con artists trying to steal from you. You will get lots of emails from people trying to steal from you. The Nigerian scams you most likely get on your personal email, has many commercial email versions. Eventually you will quickly be able to scan the email and instantly pick out the key scam parts to see the email for what it is.

It is tempting, especially when you just start and sales are slow, to get excited over getting a big sale and want to believe it's legitimate. If you're questioning whether it's real, chances are it's not legitimate.

There are many ways to spot fraud, some are easy, and some are much more difficult. With a little practice and experience, you should be able to catch fraudulent sales when they come in, or when pre-sales emails get delivered.

Fraud Emails

The typical fraud emails have common elements. They are usually international, often with misspellings or poor grammar, and often have unusual attributes that a normal person wouldn't do, like email all in capitol letters or with no punctuation. They will usually appear to come from someone who has stature in the country from where the email is coming from, like a barrister, reverend, doctor, or minister. They will usually provide a name right from the beginning, like “Hi, my name is Michael Williams, and I…” Typically, real customers don't like to provide personal information. The names scammers use are also usually a very generic name that would seem uncommon for the country they are located in.

The most obvious signs of an email fraud are the desire to have the order shipped to certain countries, and the statement in the email that they will be paying by credit card. Again, most real customers when emailing to ask a question, don't offer extra information. A more recent variation on the emails now that businesses are becoming aware of these countries, is claiming that their personal shipper will pick up the order from you, and ship it to them.

The biggest countries for fraud are Nigeria, Indonesia, and some surrounding countries that will forward packages to those countries. For example, a package labeled with Australia as the country, but with an Indonesia address and postal code, will be forwarded to Indonesia.

Often these emails will not mention specific items the person would like to purchase, and many will actually ask you to send them your website URL, so that they can see what they want to order. The emails are generic so they can email dozens of companies using the same email. Other times, they may request abnormally large amounts of a product, maybe with a claim that they are starting a store in their country and want to stock it.