S2E08: Steve Moffatt, Phorest Salon Software

Steve Moffatt is a payments industry expert, holding over 10 years of experience in iGaming, currency transfer and fraud risk at companies such as WorldRemit, Spotify and now at Phorest Salon Software.

He was formerly a member of the European Advisory Board at Merchant Risk Council (MRC) and passionate about sharing knowledge with other fraud professionals – incredibly fortunate to have such an experienced fraud fighter on the show!

From your perspective, how would you describe the risk and fraud industry right now?

It’s getting more challenging.

With the use of telegram and other networks, you can find groups and it’s just a bunch of people just talking about how they’re going to attack your site. That’s excellent.

But more and more it’s on the dark web and diverting elsewhere; you can see the start of a chat and then someone goes, okay, DM me now for the full details. Then you lose all the content.

From an emergent fraud perspective, you’re relying on your network to tell you, X is happening or Y has happened to us and we’ve been hit and couldn’t avoid this.

The telephone industry goes up particularly well from a fraud perspective that there’s a really tight network. For all the managers who discuss their businesses, in a safe space, I tip my hat to you.

The online gambling industry does that really well too. I think both in terms of the fraud, but also responsible gambling, these companies have to be talking to each other to better their processes and the industry as a whole.

But the industries that are sharing are mitigating risk better than those that aren’t – that’s just face.

Unfortunately, there are still industries where that sharing of knowledge and information doesn’t occur because, I think people (incorrectly) see that information as some kind of competitive advantage. It isn’t.

Totally get that everything, can be seen as a competitive advantage, but on the other side, it’s only a competitive advantage in fraud if want your fraud blocked and wish it upon your competitors which is something I think the average person doesn’t subscribe to.

I believe we should all be sharing as much knowledge as possible but then, probably, the fraud moves to a different industry. It never goes away. It’s water flowing downhill and if it hits a hard rock, it’ll go around us somewhere.

How do you view the surge of businesses jumping online in the last couple of years from a risk perspective?

My feeling is that there aren’t enough fraudsters for the number of opportunities happening right now. I think I’m a bit of a pessimist here but there’s so much room to abuse and scam from this online transformation.

Whenever I’m online I’m purchasing something from a store I always think what was the 3d secure flow there? They seem to think that AVS is super important and it works really well.

I mean, you can stand up a Stripe integration or a Shopify integration and start selling in a couple of hours – if fraudsters were to cast their eyes upon this and really knuckle down on their strategies, the exposure is 100% of all of those trends.

This is because they haven’t done the fundamentals.

It’s understandable they haven’t; they’ve got a product, people want to buy it and chargebacks are the last thing you’re going to expect. But once that fraudster comes in, or worse fraud ring, they will have the potential to completely invalidate a business model, which is, scary.

And sadly there is no way to shortcut it, you have to leverage a community, almost learn it by osmosis over time, speak to people who work in space to gain at least some understanding of what data points are valuable and how you protect your products or business.

Building a community, a real network in payments and fraud is game-changing for any business starting out.