Mumbai: With the evolving online frauds, e-commerce companies, especially those into e-ticketing and exporters, are estimated to be losing around Rs 60-70 crore a year, due to merchant frauds.
Visa and Mastercard reportedly get 50-60 complaints a month in India, says Nishanth Chandran, the co-founder and CEO of e-Billing Solutions, which launched its fraud analysts division in 2009. It has a specialised team of 18 people presently to prevent phishing attacks and expe-cts to go up to 70 next year.
According to Symantec, in May 2012, it was observed that a whopping 187 per cent rise over the previous month in phishing attacks on Indian brands.
Explaining how this is done, Chandran says that the fraudsters, who typically have servers outside India, in countries such as Russia, China or Malaysia, would write a virus and send it through an email to the targeted person. When the person clicks the link, the virus gets implanted in the target’s PC.
This software or virus, which sits on the PC, sends out sensitive information such as bank passwords to the hacker, who sells it for $2-5 per credit card data.
Chandran said there are websites like bpastebin.com, etc that sell credit card information and teenagers buy this information if their pocket money is not enough, to buy tickets to movies or buy expensive electronic goods etc.
There was a case in Europe, says Chandran, where a youth booked a whole theatre to impress his girlfriend but was caught as he was entering the theatre.
The bulk buyers are mostly Nigerians, who then steal the goods. It is a multi-billion dollar business for fraudsters, he said.
The Rs 25,000-crore Indian online travel industry is particularly most vulnerable as it is growing rapidly.
India sees around 7.5 million online transactions. As per an Indian digital consumer study done by Avendus, the online travel booking is expected to grow 22 per cent to reach Rs 55,000 crore by 2015.
The fraudsters are eyeing this market as Indian laws are lax and awareness of IT security is yet to catch up. The non-travel e-commerce comparatively records three million transactions.
According to First Data Research, the entire Indian e-commerce market is currently worth Rs 50,000 crore with 10 million Indians transacting online. This is expected to be double to Rs 1-trillion by 2015.