Unfortunately fraud is something that does exist in the e-commerce world, and is inevitable as the internet has become a go-to place for many businesses.

There are however a few ways to alleviate fraudulent transactions, that can help protect your business, with the aim to reduce chargebacks - in addition to Toggle already working with 3D Secure.

So what can you do?

It’s important to keep an eye on your Toggle account in general, and become familiar with what’s standard for you. Understanding the kinds of transactions you usually get will help you to reduce potential fraud / remove fraudulent orders that do appear.

For digital gift cards, we suggest delaying when they go live so this isn’t straight away.

Sometimes fraudsters will purchase digital gift cards with the intention of redeeming them straight away, meaning these dodgy transactions can very easily be missed by the cardholder, and yourself.

Putting a delay in place can put them off trying this, and gives you time to remove any value from gift cards you believe to be fraudulent and refund it; as well as allowing the cardholder time to contact their bank.

When creating or updating a gift card product, use the Validity rules box to delay when your products become active.

If you think your account is being attacked by bots and you are using Stripe, you can activate reCAPTCHA on Toggle which helps block spam and abuse, whilst ensuring legitimate guests can make purchases.

reCAPTCHA on your Toggle webshop will work like the video below.

There's a few steps needed to set-up this up, the first one is configuring your Google reCAPTCHA details - our guide here will show you how to do this. After which, you can configure reCAPTCHA in the Toggle dashboard:

Settings > General > click enable reCAPTCHA

Some additional fields will show in Toggle where you need to paste in the site and secret keys which you can get from Google.

You can request customers' phone numbers during the checkout process. You can use this to help you figure out whether a transaction made is possibly fraudulent or not - if you suspect it.

Orders that are fraudulent are likely to have fake phone numbers entered. Try calling the guest, and if they answer, ask them a few details about the order made to help with your investigation. If they struggle to answer basic questions about the order, this is a flag that it could be fraud.

You can ask a mixture of questions from the goods themselves; as well as things like what billing postcode was used. Bear in mind that you might have to go to your payment gateway account for some of these details as not all personal information is shown in Toggle.

Remember, that legitimate guests purchasing items for friends and family might struggle to confirm some details off the top of their head, such as the delivery address if asked - you’ll have to decide on a case by case basis if you think it’s fraud.

To add, go to Settings > General

Click 'Yes' to the 'Request a contact telephone number on checkout?' prompt.

Look for patterns, such as repeating, or very similar email addresses always being used for orders.

Google email addresses that you think are suspicious to see if others have flagged these online as fraudsters.

We suggest doing this often, ideally daily if you can - this way you’ll spot transactions quicker, and can take any actions needed. Think about how often you can realistically review your Toggle accounts transactions, and consider setting up delayed validity rules that can work to your advantage e.g. gift cards with 72 hours delay validity.

If you use Stripe, they have a product called Radar for Teams that can be turned on to help with fraud. This helps look for suspicious payments to block them, and you can set-up additional rules. See more here for how Toggle and Stripe Radar for Teams work together.

If you use Braintree as a payment gateway, see their basic fraud tools here, and for fraud suggestions from Trust Payments see their internal fraud checks here.

Adyen and Global Payments also offer their own fraud services. Check out how Adyen can support you with their fraud scores service, and what fraud detection Global Payments use.