Ecommerce transactions have been on the rise for years, but when you look at the number of digital transactions in 2020, it’s clear the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly accelerated ecommerce growth.
According to Digital Commerce 360, in 2020 consumers spent $861.12 billion online with U.S. merchants alone, which is an increase of 44% year-over-year and is triple the 15.1% growth we saw in 2019.
While consumers’ affinity for online shopping is good news for ecommerce merchants, there’s a looming threat that many are unprepared to handle, and that’s card-not-present (CNP) fraud.
At Vesta, we process billions of dollars of CNP transactions and work with merchants across the globe to prevent CNP fraud. Our deep well-honed insights peek into how fraudsters operate and how damaging their attacks can be for every company considering or engaging in online transactions.
In this report, you’ll find insights into how much fraudsters tried to steal, how their attacks in the U.S. compared to those in Mexico, which operating systems they’re using to make fraudulent transactions, and how they’ve become more sophisticated over time.
We created a global breakdown of how CNP fraud has changed from Q1 2020 through Q1 2021. We analyzed the percentage of total transactions that our transaction guarantee platform identified as having a very high likelihood of being fraudulent, as well as the average value of each of the transactions.
OUR CUSTOMER DATA SHOWS
CNP Fraud in the U.S. vs Mexico
Vesta works with merchants all over the world, but we have a particularly strong concentration of customers in the U.S. and Mexico, so we took a closer look at how fraud varies in these markets.
The percentage of attempted fraudulent transactions in the U.S. is substantially lower than in Mexico, but the value of these transactions is higher in the U.S. with the exception of Q4 2020 ($149 in the U.S. vs $155 in Mexico).
There are two types of CNP fraud that merchants need to watch out for but one is very difficult to spot: