SmartMetric, the Maker of Biometric Credit Cards, Says 60% of All Ecommerce Credit Card Fraud Attempts by Fraud Perpetrators Result in Successful Fraud Incidents – Billions of Dollars Are Lost by Merchants Each Year

SmartMetric, Inc. (OTCQB: SMME) - Alarming figures show that businesses are suffering monumental losses due to online fraud. What is also alarming is that rate of growth in online fraud for merchants is in triple figures with losses for chargebacks alone for the end of 2020 estimated to reach $30 Billion in the United States.

Chargebacks are where the credit card user amongst other things, denies making the card purchase or says they never received the goods. It is estimated that 86% of this $30 billion in “chargebacks" or to be more precise, transaction reversals, are based on fraudulent misrepresentations by the card user.

The share of total business revenue lost to fraud increased 279% between 2013 and 2016. On average merchants lost 1.9% of total revenue to fraud in 2016. In 2013 the figure was 0.68%.

Sixty percent (60%) of all credit card fraud attempts in Ecommerce channels were successful in 2016.

One area beleaguering online merchants and the credit card industry as a whole, is the area commonly referred to as “friendly fraud.” Friendly fraud is far from friendly. It is a euphemism used in the credit card industry for what is essentially “customer fraud.” In the day and age when people would need to walk into a physical business to make a purchase with a credit card, any resulting fraud was termed “friendly fraud” since the person committing the fraud and the merchant would have been in face to face contact with each other. Now that the world has moved to billions of dollars being transacted online there is no human interaction for today’s credit card fraudster. So, it is a misnomer to call online based fraud by customers “friendly fraud.” The fraud in fact is out and out customer fraud. When 86% of reported fraud resulting in the transaction being reversed and money is returned to the fraudsters account, then this is most definitely not friendly fraud. The chargeback or fraudulently returned to customer money is soon to be $30 billion in the United States alone.

An additional cost to businesses and card companies online is the number of dollars lost in “card abandonment” at the online site checkout. In order to combat online fraud, credit card processors have now ramped up automatic fraud prevention tools that are in turn causing false rejections of credit cards being used by good paying customers with good money in their accounts. It is estimated that 25% of what is called false positive transaction rejections result in the customer abandoning the transaction completely. Imagine owning a large department store and finding out that 1 in 4 of your customers turnaround and walk out without buying anything because their card is erroneously rejected by the card processor. A quick way to go bankrupt for any business. This doesn’t happen in physical retail stores anywhere near like it happens online, simply because the anti-fraud tools online are so much more restrictive of transactions than what happens at a merchant’s terminal in the physical store.