What Your Business Needs to Know

What is Happening?

As more and more companies and store owners switch from paper to online payments, fraudulent activities become more and more complex and harder to track.

What is Card Testing and How Does it Work?

Known through multiple terms like “carding”, “account testing”, and “card checking”, card testing is becoming one of the main avenues for hackers to steal from both the consumer and the merchant. Card testing is when someone tries to use stolen card information or attempts to guess card information in order to make fraudulent purchases from another card.

Hackers use computer programs to streamline this process so it becomes easier to “guess” card information. One of the more common ways to card test is to check the authorization, which is much less likely to appear on statements. Another possible way is through small payments that go easily unnoticed by both consumers and merchants.

How Prevalent is this Issue?

Online shopping is booming. Industry data shows that in Q3 of 2020, shoppers spend nearly $199.44 billion online — a 37.1% increase from the same time last year. And along with this the fastest growing online crime is card testing fraud, which increased by 200% in 2017 alone, according to a study by Radial.

How it Affects Your Business?

The owners of the credit cards are unwitting victims of card testing. But there are many more unwanted outcomes for the merchant that is attacked:

• Loss of product to fraudulent buyers
• Damage the reputation of your business
• Additional fees to settle disputes and fraudulent claims
• Potential termination of payment processing account
• What are the Strategies to Prevent Card Testing?

There are multiple ways for your business to prevent card testing. These include looking for suspicious order patterns (i.e. unusual volumes of business, repeating or sequential information on orders), identifying known countries and email and IP addresses associated with fraud, creating a suitable “unsafe list”, and having a system to automatically identify these attacks and block them and alert the merchant.

What OpenPath Does Here?

At OpenPath, it is part of our standard package to regulate and monitor suspicious credit card activity for your business. As a result, you will be protected, get notified faster and before the transactions go through. So your business is not being swindled.

What are people saying?

One of our clients recently experienced a card testing attack over a weekend (a favored time for attacks). The OpenPath system alerted them before any transactions were completed and avoided approximately $50 million in attempted fraudulent processing against their merchant account. They said, “We wouldn’t have known our store was being targeted until Monday morning without the alerts from the system. We immediately reviewed and saw that thousands of transactions were being attempted – and the OpenPath filters were blocking them. It gives us great peace of mind knowing this barrier is there.”

OpenPath provides a plethora of security backing for card testing such as checking for foreign IP addresses, monitoring small orders, and even forming a blacklist of suspicious users.

OpenPath highly recommends its protection against card testing, which has become the modern way to rob an online store. Card testing should be on all businesses’ radar, and is a major benefit of what we offer at OpenPath.