Are you selling online? If you are, you have to protect your business and customers from online fraud and cybercriminals looking for an opportunity to steal your money and information.

But the question is- are you doing your part to protect your business? To make business transactions online, you must have the right protections in place.  You should have actionable strategies in place so that your company stays strong despite many fraudulent behaviours and tricks online.

Here are handy best practices to protect your business from online fraud:

1. Verify All Identities

An automated id verification should be a staple in your fraud prevention tools. Technology can get so sophisticated that it’s easy to impersonate other people. They can even pretend to represent entire businesses.

Fortunately, technology has also become advanced to weed out these people. Instead of leaving your business vulnerable to these imposters, the right identity verification tools help you confirm someone’s identity before starting a business with them.

Read more: Identity Fraud Protection For Your Business And Everyone Involved In It

2. Regularly Monitor Business Transactions

You may realize that particular aspects of your business are predictable. If you take your time reviewing your receipts and transactions daily, you can quickly identify these dubious transactions. Now, the sooner you can find them, the easier it will be to fix them and prevent similar issues.

Ideally, we recommend that you regularly log in to your online banking or mobile banking app so that you can keep track of your balances and other important activities in your account. This also allows you to catch any unauthorized transactions quickly. You can even set up alerts that will notify you in case transactions or charges have been made to your account.

3. Enhance Password Securities

It will also help you develop complex passwords for every account. You have to make sure that every account will have a different password. Moreover, you shouldn’t use personal information like family names, addresses, and phone numbers.

That’s because using personal information in your passwords is obvious and easy to figure out. Moreover, having wrong answers to your security authentication questions can add to your security. Only selected people should also have access to passwords that are linked to sensitive accounts.

Another step that you can take to secure your IT systems is to have a password policy. Ensure that you regularly change your passwords every 60 to 90 days. Set specific rules to ensure that you have complex passwords. Ideally, use an uppercase letter, a number with at least eight characters. Use various passwords for your online and system accounts.

Read More: Safety First: 5 Ways to Increase Your Personal Security Online

4. Use a Dedicated Computer For Banking

It also helps that you have a dedicated computer for all your online financial transactions.

Ideally, ensure that you don’t use this for any other online activity like email, social media, or simply surfing the web, as this can open up your device to many vulnerabilities. As much as possible, avoid mobile banking.

5. Learn to Identify Phishing Attacks

94% of malware delivery is happening via email

Email is easy and relatively inexpensive. So, there’s no surprise that 94% of malware delivery is happening via email. Fortunately, most phishing emails are relatively easy to spot. Still, phishing tactics keep evolving, and you must always be on the lookout.

In fact, Gmail is said to block approximately 18 million malware and phishing emails daily. Still, there’s a 0.1% that’s able to bypass your spam filters. Therefore, while using spam filters, you must remain vigilant. Knowledge is one of the best weapons in your arsenal against phishing.

It would be best if you educated your employees correctly as well. That way, they could quickly identify the most common phishing tactics and instantly spot phishing emails. At the same time, they will know what’s password security and how to achieve it. Doing so makes them unlikely to fall for online frauds and scams.

6. Utilize Available Verification Options

It would help if you had a few security options to prevent fraudulent transactions. The Address Verification System (AVS) and Card Verification Value (CVV) are two main options that could be handy.

If you utilize these features, you can quickly weed out any fraudulent attempts on your credit cards. Now, if the payment processing platform doesn’t provide you with these security options, you might consider changing. And don’t forget about protecting your credit cards from your employees. A deliberate misuse of your company cards could negatively affect your credit score, preventing you from getting loans or a low-interest rate on financial products.

7. Set a Specific Limit on Your Transactions

Generally, the bigger the transaction, the higher the risk will be. But if you limit the size and number of transactions a customer makes daily, you could also potentially limit your fraud exposure.

This can be customizable, giving you the ability to offer a much higher limit based on your established relationship with your customer.

8. Run Background Checks on Your Employees

You don’t know who you’re hiring unless you do a comprehensive background check. If you want to save by skipping this during the hiring process, you can potentially become a victim of fraud.

Plenty of reputable businesses can help you run background checks on potential hires. A background check can cost you at least $50 per person or even less. Now aside from protection from fraud, background checks also allow you to trust your employees more.

9. Educate Your Employees

While your employees can be one of your biggest vulnerabilities in fraud, they can also serve as your first line of defense.

Ensure you run regular training sessions for the most basic security threats online and offline. They should also be sufficiently educated on prevention measures for new hires and your seasoned staff.

Ideally, you need to enforce the right training by using policies that will guide your employees on properly using and handling your company’s confidential information. This includes everything from your personnel, financial data, and customer information.

Over to You

So there you have it. Taking appropriate measures to protect your business from online fraud would be best. There will be a lot of fraudsters and cybercriminals out there. It is up to you to take the necessary security measures to ensure that they fail and you can secure your business.

In the same way, you also need to protect your business by using the available tools at your disposal. This ensures that your company is safe from any prospective threats from fraud. Good luck!