Intro
When you operate an online store, your customers usually have to sign in with their email address to make purchases. Did you know in terms of fraud, which types of email addresses are riskier? Read on and learn more.
Types of email addresses
In general, you can broadly classify most purchasers’ email addresses into 3 distinct categories. These are the disposable, free and company emails.
Let’s start with the easiest one that everyone is familiar with, the free emails. This category covers all the free email providers out there like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and so on. The defining characteristic is that you don’t have to pay anything to sign up for a permanent email with these providers.
Next, you have the company emails. Company emails may not necessarily refer to a company per se. It just refers to email domains that are registered by either persons or organizations which are not freely available to outsiders.
Last of all, the disposable emails. There are disposable email providers out there such as Mailinator which allows anyone to sign up for a temporary email address. Such email addresses have a time limit before it’s no longer usable.
Which type of email address is riskier?
For an online retailer, accepting orders from users with disposable emails is a sure way to attract fraudsters. If you have nothing to hide, why would you purchase something using a disposable email? Disposable emails are anonymous and there is no way to trace the users. It is free to sign up for disposable emails so it’s a favorite tool for malicious parties to use when buying stuff online with stolen credit cards. As a merchant, never accept online orders coming from disposable email addresses.
Now, would you say an order coming from a free email address is acceptable? This question depends on whether the items you’re selling are high priced products. You need to consider the fact that most people will be using a free email address as their personal correspondence tool. If you’re selling normal items that are not high priced, it should be safe to accept orders from free email addresses. But if you’re talking about expensive items, you can opt to perform manual order verification by calling the user. This way, you can strike a balance between risk management and making a sale.
For company emails, these are generally safe in terms of order fraud as registering an email domain is not free and most fraudsters won’t go down that route. Still, it better to check when the domain was registered. Newly registered domains could be a sign of fraud. You can easily check such information via the IP2Whois website.
Make life easier and safer for yourself
Do you want to make your life easier by automating fraud checks such as those mentioned above on your online store? You can just sign up for the free FraudLabs Pro Micro plan and integrate the fraud detection plugins into your shopping cart. It is really that easy.