Alan Smith, business development director of ClearCommerce Europe explains:
"Fraudsters are donating money online or purchasing goods from online charity shops as a way to confirm the credit/debit card details are accurate. Most charities do not have secure risk management/payment processing tools in place, so fraudsters can go unnoticed making repeat donations until they are sure the cardholder details are correct. This information is then used by criminals to rob online retailers in large scale strikes. To prevent this from happening, charities must report any unusual activity to the police."

ClearCommerce Europe is issuing a warning to charities, retailers, banks and consumers ahead of the Christmas purchasing rush, when fraudsters will aim to capitalise on the surge in consumer spending habits.

Convio, a leading provider of online fundraising solutions currently provides ClearCommerce's anti-fraud tools to 175 of the company's 300-plus non-profit clients via their Convio-powered websites.

Dr. David Crooke, Convio co-founder and CTO commented: "Although our clients can't be defrauded of merchandise online, we use ClearCommerce FraudShield to help prevent our clients' websites from being abused by would-be fraudsters. Because non-profit groups don't have the resources to manually review suspicious transactions the way large e-commerce companies do, it's essential for us to have access to technology that can make automated, real-time anti-fraud decisions to prevent bad transactions from getting into the system in the first place, and to avoid the administrative cost of reversing them."

Smith concluded: "New fraud prevention initiatives launched by banks such as Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode are still a long way from eradicating fraud. In the fast moving and dynamic world of fraud prevention: whenever you find a fix, the crooks will find a way around it. We must all remain vigilant to prevent e-commerce fraud, charities included."