Online fraud is tipped to be a hit this Christmas, according to two reports from US online security vendors.
In the fifth annual e-commerce survey from CyberSource, 333 e-tailers said they expected to lose nearly 2 per cent of their annual revenue.
Taking that as a percentage of total US e-commerce revenues, the report estimates losses will amount to $1.6 billion (£938.9 million).
Perceptions of fraud have worsened over the year, with the number of retailers seeing it as a serious problem rising from 46 per cent to 66 per cent.
Two thirds of retailers are still checking some orders for fraudulent transactions manually and the proportion of sales they are checking has increased from one in five to one in four.
This concern was echoed by Address Verification System (AVS) service provider ClearCommerce, which found an 80 per cent increase in AVS-match order fraud activity.
AVS, which matches the requested delivery address with the address the card is registered to, is one of the principal tools recommended by card issuers to retailers in the fight against card-not-present fraud.
However, ClearCommerce warns that AVS is not enough on its own to track down identity theft fraud, where a card holder's full details are known by a fraudster.
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