Orenstein says transport firms are forced to deal with the crime by themselves
Courier start-up Zoom2u boss Steve Orenstein states that bank and police shortfalls have led his firm to put a crime-detecting algorithm on the case.
The issue is with stolen credit cards being used for fraudulent ecommerce transactions.
As much as with the criminals themselves, Orenstein’s beef is with banks that leave his customers out of pocket charge-back arrangements and state police that appear ill-equipped to deal with this kind of crime.
“Now, because the banking systems have yet to come up with a smart way to transact online, anyone with those credit card details can buy goods online and the transaction will go through without any problems at all,” Orenstein says in a blog and in a column in the next edition of ATN magazine.
“It’s absolutely insane that it’s still possible to do this, I believe the banks need to be held accountable for this; they should be the ones bearing the costs because of their in ability to provide a secure payment process.”
Zoom2u’s experience with its efforts to aid police investigations, one of which involved photographic and other evidence identifying a repeat perpetrator and stolen goods worth at least $15,000, appears to have come to nothing.
Orenstein says he is frustrated as “the problem is, it appears like they haven’t been trained on this type of white collar crime”.
He tells ATN that, along with the good-citizenship aspect, one spur for the algorithm’s development and going public about the issue is the risk of eventual reputational damage in ecommerce for his part of the transport industry.
“All the courier companies have this problem and no one talks about it,” he says.
“And no one talks about because they can’t stop it and they don’t have the technology ability to stop it.”
He notes that some firms fear they may be targeted if they do speak out and also believes the problem goes further than that segment.
At present, Orenstein says Zoom2u has no plans to market the algorithm that it developed in-house on a company platform, acknowledging it is a point of difference for his firm.
He also believes wider dissemination would allow criminals to adapt to such a shield and that the technology will always need to evolve.
Explaining how it works, he says: “When a booking comes in, we have an algorithm that goes through and looks at the characteristics of that booking to identify if there are possibilities of that being a fraudulent transaction.”
Read the full column in ATN’s March edition.