West Bromich - UK capital of eCommerce fraud!

West Bromwich is a 140,000 sized town about half way between London and Liverpool. It is the largest town in the United Kingdom without its own Royal Mail postcode. It does have a decent football club, though, and the Latin motto on the town's coat of arms translates as "Work Conquers All".

It also happens to be the UK capital of eCommerce fraud.

According to RSA eCommerce Transaction Monitoring data, 2.13% of all online shopping done from an IP address in West Bromwich turns out to be fraudulent. By comparison, 0.39% of transaction value originating from London turns out to be fraud (of course, in absolute terms London outweighs any other city when it comes to fraud; but in relative terms it’s not so bad).

The full top 10 list can be found in the image below. All UK folks, quickly look down to see if you live in one of the top 10 fraud towns :)

The data reflects attempted online shopping fraud: in other words, this is what fraudsters who have compromised credit and debit cards TRIED to get away with. Fortunately the UK card issuers subscribe to eCommerce protection programs such as Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode; on top of that they run a sophisticated behind-the-scenes eCommerce transaction monitoring system. The result: nearly all of this attempted fraud is caught, with little interruption to good customers’ traffic. The  specific data set includes three of the top 5 UK card issuers, for the period of January-May 2010.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that West Bromwich hosts a secret society of evil doers, who unleash wave after wave of criminal acts upon unsuspecting victims worldwide.

There could be a perfectly logical explanation of why the town is so big in fraud: for instance, there might be a relatively high number of hijacked computers in West Bromwich, and fraudsters always like using local proxy machines when they do eCommerce fraud because they know buying a Plasma TV when your IP address maps to Ghana isn’t a good idea.

To give another example, Israel is typically located as the #2 country (after Nigeria) from which fraud transactions occur. But that’s not because of the thriving criminal underground in the holy land, but rather because an Israeli company called Gilat Satellites has set up thousands of dishes around third world countries, connecting small villages to the Internet. These all map to a particular router in Israel, so IP geo-location will show a transaction originating in Israel. Since lots of fraudsters use this satellite connection, Israel gained top-of-list position.

Whether the finding reflects criminal elements hiding in West Bromwich or points to genuine users whose hijacked PC serves as a safe haven for eCommerce fraudsters half across the globe, at least now you know a little bit more about West Bromwich. And if you happen to be in town, don’t miss out on visiting the lovely Public art gallery.