🛡️ 🗺️ Let’s chat about Travel Fraud Protection!
Travel fraud prevention or travel fraud protection is a set of proactive measures that can and should be taken by businesses working in the travel and hospitality sphere to timely detect fraudulent activities and prevent them from happening.
Types of fraud in the travel industry and ways to combat them:
➡️ Travel insurance fraud
Each insurance claim is checked and validated one by one. Carriers can take a look at the previous claims history of the insured for comparison. Typically, they follow the same scenario when conning an insurer. Artificial intelligence and machine learning tools are widely adopted in the insurance sector to automate claim processing. Such tools are trained over lots of data to look for anomalies that can alert the business to potentially fraudulent activity patterns. They take into account a variety of features that a human may miss or accept as normal.
➡️ Stolen credit card fraud
While difficult, travel businesses can prevent this kind of fraud by monitoring transactions and creating a risk score. At checkout, companies may pay attention to the type of a credit card (whether it is local or foreign as the latter has a higher chance of fraudulence), the mismatch between a payer’s IP address and billing information, repeated purchases from the same user within a short period of time. Credit card fraud detection, of course, can be automated with the software we’re going to review further.
➡️ Fake online travel agency fraud
No matter how obvious it sounds, ensure your travel agency is reputable and legitimate in the eyes of your customers. Make it easy for your users to identify your website, so invest in your branding. In addition to that, pay attention to internal linking since it may help users still get back to the original site because links are rarely deleted by fraudsters. If cloning has already happened, discover and block the IP of a clone site and then reach out to the domain provider, host, or CDN to explain the situation.
Also, it won’t harm to conduct some webinars or run information campaigns where you would explain the distinctions between a real OTA and a doppelganger.
➡️ Friendly fraud
Communication can resolve issues with friendly fraudsters who don’t actually intend harm. In other cases, travel vendors can use chargeback alert services and programs like Visa Merchant Purchase Inquiry that provide a window of opportunity to resolve customer complaints before the chargeback takes effect.
Friendly fraud chargebacks can be disputed. For this, merchants will need enough information to prove that a buyer is committing chargeback abuse. The data may include browsing information, proof of delivery, positive payment results, address matches, phone and email matches, IP connections, etc. Instead of manually doing it all, travel providers can use AI-powered platforms like Riskified, Signifyd, or SEON, for example, that help identify the individual behind online interactions.
