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E-commerce & Marketplaces

Fraud, engineered out of checkout

Your storefront was built to take money quickly — which is exactly why it takes money from the wrong people just as fast. We build the defences that stop stolen-card fraud, card testing, account takeover and chargebacks at the point they happen, tuned so genuine customers never feel a thing. Not a report. The systems themselves.

The problem

The attacker uses your checkout exactly as designed

An online store is a target the moment it accepts a card. The attacker does not need to breach anything — they use the flow you built, with someone else's money. For Australian online retailers and marketplaces the pressure is doubled: you are fighting fraud while every extra check you add turns away real buyers. Win by blocking everything and you have no business; win by trusting everything and the chargebacks bury you. The job is not to eliminate fraud, it is to engineer the trade-off — and that is an engineering problem, not a policy memo.

The threats are not one problem but a family of distinct attacks, each with its own economics and its own defence:

  • Stolen-card, card-not-present (CNP) fraud. A criminal spends stolen card details online. No chip, no PIN, no cashier — the physical defences do not exist, and it almost always ends in a chargeback once the real cardholder notices.
  • Card testing and BIN attacks. Fraudsters run large volumes of stolen numbers through your checkout and payment API with tiny or zero-dollar authorisations to find which cards are live. Your store becomes a free validation service — and the flood hurts your authorisation rates and your standing with acquirers.
  • Account takeover. Rather than a stolen card, the attacker steals the customer — logging into a real account with a saved card, stored value or loyalty balance and draining it. It bypasses most payment controls because the account and order history look clean.
  • Friendly (first-party) fraud. The genuine cardholder buys, receives the goods, then disputes the charge as unrecognised or undelivered. Opportunism, a household member, or honest confusion at a strange descriptor — either way the money leaves.
  • Refund, promo and coupon abuse. Empty-box returns, "never arrived" claims, multi-account sign-up farming and scripted referral loops that quietly bleed margin.
  • Triangulation. A fake listing takes a genuine order from an unwitting shopper, then fulfils it by buying from you with a stolen card. The shopper is happy, you ship, and the chargeback lands weeks later.
  • Bot abuse at checkout and login. Card testing, credential stuffing, promo farming and inventory scraping all run on automation hitting your most sensitive endpoints at machine speed.
How we help

We build the defences, not a slide deck

The Big 4 will hand you a maturity assessment and a list of things to fix. We go into your storefront, your payment flow and your account layer, find the holes their questionnaire never reaches, and engineer the controls that close them — then tune them against your real traffic.

Fraud-prevention systems & detection engineering

Risk scoring built for your money flows — rules, thresholds and models that let low-risk orders through untouched and escalate only what earns it. Engineered into checkout, not bolted on as an afterthought.

Checkout & login bot defence

Velocity and rate limits per device, IP, card and session; bot management at your most sensitive endpoints; and invisible-to-visible challenges that separate scripted traffic from humans — the single most effective control against card testing and credential stuffing.

Device & behavioural signals

Fingerprinting and behavioural analytics that look past the card to how the order is placed — scripted sessions, typing cadence, time-zone mismatches, and the device quietly placing forty orders on forty cards.

3-D Secure 2 step-up strategy

Selective authentication that shifts chargeback liability to the issuer where it matters, applied as a step-up on medium- and high-risk orders only — so you gain the protection without adding friction to the low-risk majority.

Chargeback representment tooling

Systems that capture and retain the right evidence at the moment of sale — proof of delivery, AVS/CVV match, 3-D Secure data, device and account history — so a dispute weeks later is already an assembled, reason-code-matched case.

Transaction monitoring

Real-time monitoring across buyer and seller activity that catches refund abuse, triangulation, payout fraud and anomalous patterns — tuned to surface what matters instead of drowning your team in false positives.

Custom fraud software

Where an off-the-shelf tool cannot fit your stack, we build the engine — bespoke risk services, decisioning APIs and review tooling engineered for your platform and integrated to run, not to shelve.

IT security & pentesting of the platform

Fraud controls sit on top of a platform that has to be secure. We penetration-test the storefront, checkout, account and admin surfaces, review the cloud and application security around them, and harden the APIs your payment and fraud tooling depend on.

Account takeover

The attack that walks straight past payments

Account takeover deserves its own attention because it defeats most payment-fraud controls by design: the card is already on file, the account is real, and the order history is clean. The attack starts at the login page, so that is where we start the defence. We engineer credential-stuffing protection that blunts the bulk-replay of leaked passwords before an account opens; multi-factor authentication that is required for the high-risk actions — changing a delivery address, adding a payment method, redeeming stored value — that precede a fraudulent order; and login and session anomaly detection that watches for new devices, impossible travel, and the classic pattern of a detail change immediately followed by a high-value purchase. Step up when the pattern looks wrong; trust the session when it does not.

Chargebacks

Won on evidence, not argument

When a dispute lands, the reason code dictates which evidence is relevant and the deadline is unforgiving — miss the window and you forfeit regardless of how strong the case was. The most valuable thing you can build is the habit of capturing the right records automatically at the point of sale, so representment becomes assembling an existing case rather than scrambling for screenshots. We build that capture into your flow and wire it to reason-code-matched submission: proof of delivery to the cardholder's address, AVS and CVV results, 3-D Secure authentication data, device and IP records, and the account and order history that ties the purchase to a genuine customer. Friendly fraud in particular is beaten here, after the fact, because the transaction itself was real — your delivery and authentication records are what expose the dispute as opportunistic. For the full playbook, read our guide to stopping e-commerce fraud and chargebacks.

The trade-off

Fraud loss against conversion

Every control you add turns away some genuine customers alongside the fraudsters, so the goal is never to minimise fraud in isolation — it is to optimise the whole system. We tune your programme so that friction maps to risk: invisible for the many, escalating for the few. And we instrument it so the numbers are visible as a set — fraud rate, chargeback rate, false positives, review load and representment win rate — because pushing any one of them hard on its own makes another give way. That balance is different for every store and it moves as the attackers adapt, which is why we build it to be re-tuned, not set once and forgotten.

The engagement

Find the leak, then close it

We work end to end across the capabilities an online store actually needs — on retainer, by project, or on call when an incident hits. Explore the full set on our services page.

Common questions

E-commerce security, answered

How is your e-commerce fraud work different from a Big 4 review?

We build the defences rather than hand you a report. A typical review documents your gaps and leaves the fixing to you; we engineer the controls into your storefront and payment flow — velocity limits, bot defence at checkout and login, device and behavioural signals, 3-D Secure 2 step-up logic, and representment tooling — then tune them against your real traffic. We find the holes the big-firm review misses because we are inside the code and the data, not reading a questionnaire.

Can you reduce chargebacks without hurting conversion?

Yes — that trade-off is the whole point of the engineering. We treat risk as a spectrum rather than a gate: low-risk orders pass with no friction, step-up authentication such as 3-D Secure 2 is applied only to medium- and high-risk orders, and a small band of genuinely suspicious orders is routed to review. We measure fraud rate, chargeback rate, false positives and review load together, so cutting fraud does not quietly cost you good customers.

How do you stop card testing and BIN attacks on a storefront?

Card testing is a volume attack, so we cap the volume at the edge of your payment flow: velocity and rate limits per device, IP, card and session; bot detection at checkout; invisible or visible challenges on repeated attempts; blocking of anonymising infrastructure; and removal of any zero-dollar or trivially small authorisation path that only serves attackers. These controls sit in front of the issuer, so the flood never reaches — or costs — you.

Do you defend marketplaces as well as single-brand stores?

Yes. Marketplaces carry every risk a single store faces plus seller-side fraud, collusion, triangulation and payout abuse. We engineer buyer-side controls (CNP fraud, account takeover, chargebacks) alongside seller onboarding checks, transaction monitoring across both sides of the platform, and payout controls — because on a marketplace the money can leak from either end.

Can you secure the storefront platform itself, not just payments?

Yes. Fraud controls sit on top of a platform that also has to be secure. We penetration-test the storefront, checkout, account and admin surfaces, review the cloud and application security around them, and harden the integrations and APIs that fraud tooling and payment providers plug into. Fraud prevention and IT security are the same job done at two layers, and we do both.

Where is your store leaking?

Card testing hammering checkout, account takeover on loyalty balances, or friendly fraud you keep losing at representment — tell us how the money moves and we'll point you to the right first move, even if it's not us.