Footasylum moves to tackle suspicious refund claims

By

Barbara Santamaria

Published
Jan 27, 2020

Footasylum has taken steps to combat suspicious claims and persistent refund requests from online shoppers, making it the latest retailer to target an issue that can be extremely costly for businesses.

The footwear chain, which has more than 65 stores across the UK and stocks international brands including Nike and Adidas, has signed up to Claims Detect Online, a new tool from not-for-profit initiative National Business Crime Solution (NBCS).

CDO is a data-sharing platform designed to help retail businesses spot potentially fraudulent non-delivery claims.

“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,” said Richard Hodson, Footasylum operations director.

“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.”

According to NBCS, online retailers lose over £400 million as a result of fraudulent ‘goods lost in transit’ claims, with £40 being the average cost of a claim.

Research conducted by Transactis and The Logistics Manager has also revealed that just 13% of retailers were confident they could identify a genuine claim from a false one.

The use of CDO will complement Footasylum’s own fraud detection capabilities, which are built in as part of its payment processing system. The retailer also uses machine learning analytics at the checkout to detect any fraudulent attempts.