Safeguarding Online Payments Against Fraud

Fraudsters are constantly finding new ways to target businesses, making it vital to your operations to stay vigilant. While processing payments online offers convenience and efficiency, it also comes with risks. Although no system is completely foolproof, understanding common threats and taking proactive steps can help reduce your exposure.

Here are some tips and information to help you stay alert and better protect your business from online payment fraud.

Payment Buttons

A public-facing payment button is a clickable button or link that customers can see on a website, email, or digital invoice and use to start a payment. It usually sends them to a secure checkout page or opens a payment form where they can pay by card, wallet, or another supported method. It is commonly used for “Pay Now” or “Buy Now” actions.

Reducing Fraud on Payment Buttons

Businesses can reduce fraudulent card activity on a public-facing payment button by combining strong front-end controls, transaction risk checks, and velocity monitoring. The most effective approach is to treat the button as one entry point in a layered fraud strategy, not as a standalone security control.

A public-facing payment button should identify the checkout action, route to a hosted or tokenized payment flow, and expose no card data, customer data, or internal business logic.

It is recommended to implement the public payment button as a login-gated feature. While the button remains visible to users, selecting it should prompt the user to sign in. Upon successful authentication, the user can then be redirected to the payment page or presented with the checkout button.

This approach is commonly supported by either a redirect or an embedded checkout flow behind a validated user account login.

Common ways to implement Fraud Prevention:

• Protect the page, not the button. Put the payment form or checkout page behind authentication so only logged-in users can access it. The public-facing button simply links to that protected page, and the app redirects unauthenticated users to log in first.
• Use a login redirect. The button can send the user to /login?next=/checkout, then return them to checkout after successful sign-in. This is the cleanest approach for custom sites and is consistent with standard authentication-gated checkout flows.
• Use a hosted payment page or payment link behind the login. The merchant site can hide the actual payment URL and only generate or reveal it after login, while the payment itself is processed on the provider’s hosted page.
  

Gateway Fraud Prevention Tools

Another effective measure to reduce online fraudulent activity is to enable fraud prevention tools available within the payment gateway.

Gateway fraud prevention offers rule-based tools that help detect, flag, and block suspicious payment activity in real time. It supports controls like IP, email, country, card, and transaction-amount rules, plus thresholds for transaction volume and frequency.

What it includes:

• Rule-based transaction screening that can block or flag transactions before they fully process.
• Customizable bans and exceptions for specific users, cards, IPs, or countries.
• Threshold controls for daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly transaction amounts and counts.
• Card testing detection with real-time alerts and account restriction workflows.

By remaining vigilant, training employees thoroughly, and using the right security tools, retailers can reduce risk and respond more quickly to potential threats.

If you have questions, or need assistance signing up for available fraud prevention tools, contact our customer service department at customerservice@retailers.com.