For websites that connect buyers to sellers, the idea of there being some actual person monitoring every aspect of each transaction is an important consideration. It’s not always the case—often sites are controlled by algorithms and programmatic interactions with little human oversight. But what happens when something goes wrong?
Fraud Prevention in the Proxibid Marketplace
Proxibid has a robust risk system designed by industry leaders. The banking-quality fraud prevention tools are built around two simple ideas:
- Ensure buyers and sellers are who they say they are
- Ensure buyers and sellers follow through on their commitments
Proxibid’s risk team is managed by John Murnane, a regarded industry expert in security and operations, a role he filled at PayPal. The Proxibid security philosophy is built on both automated processes, and human oversight—it’s managed by actual people watching over real transactions that happen every day. In fact, almost 10% of all transactions are approved manually by trained risk staff using data from third party partners to validate a person’s wherewithal to complete a transaction.
A recognized security, fraud, and compliance issues authority, Murnane is a sought-after speaker and his industry peers ask him often to consult on broad security matters in the auction and payments space. Proxibid has many real-life examples of how its security and fraud systems work. For example, recently when a new user set up an account, questionable purchases triggered red flags for the fraud team.
A valid credit card was attached to the account, and the name and address matched perfectly, but the security team noticed that the type of items being purchased was outside of the norm for the geographical area where the account was based. After an investigation, it was determined that the card on the account, although valid, was stolen.
When Proxibid contacted the owner of the card, she was not even aware it had been stolen. The fraud was halted before any merchandise was shipped out, no auction sellers were impacted, and there were no charges to the card owner.
On another occasion, a group of international fraudsters used stolen foreign credit cards to attack several auction sites at the same time, including Proxibid—in fact, they tried more than 200 times to set up a Proxibid account in a short time span. The accounts were flagged every time, because the credit cards they were using were outside of the parameters for typical card types used by Proxibid buyers and sellers—another security condition event trigger.
Proxibid’s security team found these criminals were targeting sellers of gold coins and other valuables across many different sites, all using remarkably similar account names. Once successful, they would send the merchandise to a warehouse in the U.S., where it was then forwarded overseas. As a result, buyers lost their money, and sellers received chargeback notices from their credit card issuers. Eventually, John was able to locate some of their stateside accomplices, and shut down the entire theft ring.
The Proxibid risk system is one part of the entire Proxibid Marketplace, built to be a secure platform where both seller and buyer financial information is protected with the most up-to-date technology and monitored by an experienced security team. When users are protected, the rest of the auction process is enjoyable and effective for everyone.