The David Of Industry Versus The Goliath Of Online Fraud: Protecting The Public From Cyber-Attacks

The Web is both an Alexandria of information, an ever-growing library of collections old and new, and a Gomorrah of criminals, fraudsters, thieves, and agents of deception and greed.

For consumers, this problem is a matter of public record: We know about – many of us know all too well about the consequences of – crimes against our credit card and checking accounts, in addition to attempts by these criminals to commit identity theft and entrap us with various scams and charades.

(Disclaimer: I am not an investor in, an employee of or a consultant to any company referenced in this column. All citations are the result of my own research, free of of any financial or ethical conflicts.)

We know less about – and we should make it a priority to educate ourselves about the dangers to – small business owners, the very lifeblood of our economy, who are the targets of a specifically sinister kind of fraud.

I refer to the redirection of consumers from one site to another, where, through the theft of a few cents per transaction here, and the robbery of a few dollars per transaction there, small business owners lose a collective amount of billions of dollars.

According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), debt collection, identity theft and impostor scams are among the most common categories of consumer complaints received by the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network in 2015, which is in the agency’s new data book.

“We recognize that identity theft and unlawful debt collection practices continue to cause significant harm to many consumers,” says Jessica Rich, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

“Steps like the recent upgrade to IdentityTheft.gov and our leadership of a nationwide initiative to combat unlawful debt collection practices are critical to our ongoing work to protect consumers from these harms.”

Consider, too, the threat to online retailers from this particular group of swindlers. For example: An increasing volume of Web traffic comes from bots, spiders, extensions, headless browsers, toolbars and other actors. The sophistication of how these bots disguise themselves requires continuous – and constantly evolving – means of detection.

Now, factor in the average amount ($10,000) small business owners spend on traditional and online advertising, based on figures from this extensive discussion thread on Quora.

If fraudsters cause these people to lose sales, if all the money spent on marketing to attract customers to a site nonetheless results in the misdirection and theft of those transactions, then small business owners will soon find themselves personally bereft and professionally bankrupt.

Adam Rogas, Co-Founder and CEO of NS8, a firm that seeks to neutralize these risks, says:

“Threats abound online, coming from a multitude of places. Fraudsters around the globe want to steal huge sums of money, albeit in tiny increments, from small business owners. The worldwide nature of these attacks demands on-the-ground monitoring and evaluation of each purported customer.”

We must acknowledge the gravity of this problem, because we must do everything possible to end this problem.

Small business owners do not deserve this heartache, and consumers should not be the victims of yet another financial headache.

Now is the time to stop online fraud.