Tucows Joins Ethoca-Powered Global Fraud-Fighting Community

December 2, 2008; 09:51 AM

Toronto (PRWEB) December 2, 2008 -- Ethoca, the company powering the Global Fraud-Fighting Community, today announced that Tucows, a global provider of domain names, email and other Internet services, is its newest member. 

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• Tucows conducts millions of transactions annually and as a result, faces unique challenges in verifying the identity of customers who purchase exclusively through customer-not-present transactions, and efficiently processing orders while managing fraud risk.
-- Through OpenSRS (http://opensrs.com), Tucows interacts with over 9,000 web hosting companies and Internet Service Providers to manage over 8 million domain names and millions of email boxes.
-- Tucows provides services to consumers and small business through Hover (http://hover.com). Hover is the easiest way for individuals and small businesses to manage their domain names and email addresses. 
-- Tucows also owns a portfolio of tens of thousands of domain names, some of which are available for resale through YummyNames (http://yummynames.com).

• The Ethoca-powered Global Fraud-Fighting Community provides an important new source to verify and authenticate good orders and sift out the bad ones. With Ethoca, Tucows will augment its existing fraud management tools with a large pool of both positive and negative customer experiences, as well as rejected order experiences, which will enable it to serve new customers more quickly while improving its ability to identify bad orders.
• A major issue for domain providers is that the majority of fraud they must deal with comes from stolen credit cards used by fraudsters whose aim is to create new domains to launch phishing and spam attacks. Stopping a fraudster also means eliminating the two or three weeks of abuse that occur before the account is abandoned or shut down due to the criminal activity perpetrated from the account. The benefits include reducing credit card charge-backs, tied up domain names, and bandwidth usage, as well as the effects spam and phishing have on victims.
• Tucows will use Ethoca to improve customer experiences and speed order processing by leveraging positive order histories to make more informed customer decisions based on community data. Likewise, by contributing its data to the community pool, Tucows will provide its collaboration partners with knowledge they can use to identify their own good-risk customers.
• Too often neglected as a cost of fraud management, an improved customer shopping experience is a unique benefit provided by the Ethoca-powered Global Fraud-Fighting Community.

• "Tucows knows modern fraud management means keeping fraudsters at bay, but it also means ensuring a positive experience for our customers," said Ross Rader, Director of Retail Services, Tucows. "By working with the Global Fraud-Fighting Community we reduce the need for manual fraud reviews and avoid delays for customers. This improves the experience and transparency for all parties involved in a transaction with us, from customers to partners to credit card companies."
• "Our objective is to reduce our total cost of fraud to as close to zero as possible," said Ross Rader, Tucows Director of Retail Services, Tucows. "Fraud costs us time, effort and money. Ethoca offers a unique, collaborative approach that is substantially different and adds significant value by reducing all of these costs."
• "As one of the top domain registrars and an innovation leader in providing Internet services, Tucows is a very exciting addition to the Global Fraud-Fighting Community," said Andre Edelbrock, CEO, Ethoca. "The fact that criminal gangs both perpetrate credit card fraud to set up accounts, and then use those accounts to hijack the system and create phishing and spam attacks which are then used to perpetrate identity theft against consumers, puts domain registrars at the nexus of many types of cybercrime. We're thrilled that Tucows will be taking aim at all these problems with our solution. It really demonstrates the power of community collaboration to fight back against fraud and other forms of crime."

• Nearly 98 percent of online transactions are legitimate, but most fraud management solutions focus on the fraudulent 2 percent. To keep this fraud rate low, online businesses refer more than 27 percent of transactions for manual review. Yet after review, more than half of all merchants accept over 90 percent of these orders and 2/3 of merchants accept more than 80 percent. Put simply: the largest online businesses overspend by enormous sums to inspect orders manually, 80 percent or more of which could be saved if they had better customer experience data to identify the good customers and give them a better purchasing experience. Ironically, the current process costs a lot of money to protect against a small minority of actual fraudulent transactions.
• The primary reason for such a large percentage of manually checked orders is a lack of prior experiences with the customer. That is where Ethoca fits into the puzzle. The Global Fraud Fighting Community powered by Ethoca is the only source of positive experience information about customers who have yet to make a purchase from a particular merchant, and the only way to cut down on the 80 percent or more of manually reviewed orders that didn't require checking. Manual reviews represent by far the largest cost of managing fraud, and are often the source of processing and shipping delays that degrade the customer's experience.
• The ability to quickly and automatically identify good transactions means lower direct fraud costs; fewer resources dedicated to manually reviewing orders; faster order turnaround; fewer falsely rejected good orders (meaning higher revenues) and a significantly better customer experience. Most fraud tools, if they can deal with this problem at all, attempt to sort orders based on predictive scoring algorithms or evaluating other risk factors using scant information -- in other words, they guess, rather than know -- which is the primary source of errors both in accepting bad orders and refusing good ones.
• Fueled by the 20 percent annual growth rate in Internet shopping, customer-not-present transactions are rapidly becoming the primary source of payment fraud.

To be more successful in combating fraud, companies must collaborate across and within industries by securely sharing order experiences in a way that is not a competitive threat. Ethoca enables businesses that operate in customer-not-present environments (Internet, phone, fax or mail) to make more informed decisions about their customer transactions, by sharing order experience data in a way that is secure, automated, effective and ethical. Community members see an improved customer experience, increased revenue from fewer wrongly rejected orders and reduced fraud and fraud-related costs.

Ethoca™ is a registered trademark of Ethoca Limited. For more information about Ethoca visit www.ethoca.com.

About Tucows
Tucows is an internet services company that provides back office solutions and wholesale internet services to a global network of more than 6,000 web hosting companies, internet service providers (ISPs) and other service providers worldwide.

The original software download site, Tucows.com, earned its name early on for being the first to provide software on a "freeware" or "shareware" basis. We currently host more than 40,000 software titles (all tested virus and spyware free) through our international network of partner sites. These sites provide users with fast, local and safe virus and spyware free downloads.

As the largest ICANN accredited wholesale domain registrar, Tucows offers a suite of complementary internet services including: domain name registration and management, digital certificates, email services and website publishing tools. Tucows back office solutions, including the Platypus Billing System and customer relationship management solutions, enable service providers to automate and enhance their service offerings. For more information http://tucowsinc.com.

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