US-based fraud management services developer Ethoca has released a study titled Fraud Attacks across Industries. The study determines the frequency and duration of fraudsters attack in the case of one online merchant using the same stolen credit card. According to the study, the preventable proportion of fraud is connected to the frequency at which fraudsters attack more than one merchant.

In 10 percent of the cases involved in the report, a single credit card was used to commit fraud at more than one merchant.

When a fraudster commits fraud at multiple e-commerce merchants, the victimised merchants do not belong to one industry or vertical. In 71 percent of the cases, the fraud attack hits merchants that belong to multiple categories. In only 29 percent of the cases did the fraud attack belong to the same industry.

In 86 percent of the cases, the fraudster stopped using the same cards during the first 24 hours, either because the card has been cancelled by the issuer or because the fraudster started using another card

The study has concluded that cross-industry sharing is important and merchants should not limit their data sharing to their own industry. When fraud is shared, a merchant would limit the amount of fraud detected if data were shared only within their industry.

The 95 merchants involved in the research represent 61 percent of the top 500 Internet merchants, as measured by revenue and as defined by the Internet Retailer magazine for 2009. All the merchants have been registered in Ethoca’s Issuer Confirmed Fraud Alerts service from June 2010 to October 2010. Ethoca has studied 25,188 confirmed cases of fraudulent transactions from June 2010 through October 2010.