A high street footwear and fashion retailer has signed up to a new tool for spotting suspicious claims and persistent refund requests from online shoppers.
Footasylum has joined Claims Detect Online (CDO), a digital platform which monitors and analyses the audit trail of thousands of transactions across retail. The aim; to spot any anomalies. Footasylum, set up in 2005, has about 70 stores in Britain from Plymouth and Portsmouth to Glasgow and Dundee. The firm offers streetwear from such brands as Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein (pictured), Nike and Adidas.
Footasylum is already a member of the National Business Crime Solution (NBCS), the not-for-profit body that works with police and its business members to tackle serious and organised crime. NBCS developed Claims Detect Online, to combat GLIT (Goods Lost in Transit). The cost of GLIT is put at £400m per year, with £40 being the average cost of a claim.
Research by Transactis and The Logistics Manager has suggested that just 13 per cent of retailers were confident they could identify a genuine claim from a false claim.
Richard Hodson, Footasylum’s operations director, said CDO will help his business spot these spurious claims more easily. He said: “We’re already members of NBCS from a retail point of view and were keen to add the option to capture fraud on our web orders by sharing data with other businesses experiencing the same issues as us. Our objective is to identify serial offenders in respect of fraudulent ‘non-delivery’ claims and this tool will give us the ability to refuse refunds with confidence, including the ability to support our case should it end up with the ombudsman.
“There are a large number of refunds or ‘re-orders’ we have to process where we might suspect a fraudulent claim but are not confident enough to refuse the refund, in case the customer is actually legitimate. CDO provides an extra layer of confidence that potentially pushes us over the line to refuse the claim.”
Footasylum already uses fraud detection tools in its payment processing, and some machine learning analytics on the checkout. It says using CDO is an extra step.
Richard Hodson added: “We’re hoping to find serial claimants who are attempting to defraud Footasylum, along with other businesses. By sharing data, we all win.
“The test data certainly identified a number of refunds we had processed that, had we had CDO, we would have had the confidence to refuse the refund to the customer. We think the tool will also allow us to gift-wrap cases for police or civil recovery.”
Simran Baghara, fraud and legal services manager for Claims Detect Online, said: “Attracting a well-known, successful brand such as Footasylum to our platform is a real feather in the cap and a demonstration of the potential businesses see in it. When we carried out our proof of concept in 2017 it was a major success, achieved with only a handful of claims. Every time a leading brand signs up, we are casting the net wider and wider and gathering invaluable data in the fight against fraudulent claims.”
Visit www.nationalbusinesscrimesolution.com.
