As petrol fraud continues to hit petrol convenience retailers, with unattended petrol pumps favourite places for thieves to test stolen or counterfeit credit cards, global payments technology company Visa has rolled out new software to help retailers cut off thieves at the petrol pump.
“While global fraud rates across the Visa payment system remain near historic lows – less than 6 cents for every $100 transacted – fuel pumps can be targets for criminals because they are often self-service terminals,” Visa said.
The new solution, Visa Transaction Advisor (VTA), enables merchants to use real-time authorization risk scores to identify transactions that could involve lost, stolen or counterfeit cards.
A U.S. pilot test of the new service showed a 23% reduction in the rate of fraudulent transactions – all without costly infrastructure upgrades or disruption of the customer experience.
“Visa Transaction Advisor uses sophisticated analytics based on the breadth and scale of VisaNet data to flag the riskiest transactions,” said Mark Nelsen, vice president of Risk Products and Business Intelligence, Visa Inc.
After a cardholder inserts the card at the pump, Visa analyses multiple data sets such as past transactions, whether the account has been involved in a data compromise, and nearly 500 other pieces of data to create a risk score.
This allows merchants to identify those transactions with a higher risk of fraud and perform further cardholder authentication before gas is pumped.
A new report from the Australian Payments Clearing Association shows that in 2013, the rate of fraud on Australian payments cards increased from 43.6c to 48.7c in every $1,000 spent, down from the peak of 51.5c in 2011. The increase in 2013 was largely due to a rise in card-not-present fraud (linked to online retailing).