Analyzing around 1 billion transactions placed with U.S. eCommerce merchants and where they originated during the first quarter of 2012, fraud solution provider ThreatMetrix tallied a list of the top U.S. cities where fraudulent transactions are attempted online. Consider taking a closer look at transactions originating from these locations:
New York City, Atlanta and Chicago are the three top ranking cities in terms of fraud origination. According to the study transactions originating from New York City are 1.5 times more likely to be at risk for fraud than transactions coming from Atlanta and are two times more likely of being fraud than transactions coming from Chicago. Transactions were considered high risk if they were typically rejected by a merchant’s automated screening and were considered medium risk for orders that were typically manually reviewed. The largest 150 cities in the United States where then ranked by who had the highest percentage of medium and high risk transactions. Based on this scale transactions originating from New York City, Atlanta and Chicago had the highest proportion of risky transactions while Los Angeles, Omaha, Dallas, San Francisco, Houston, Washington, D.C. and Lexington (Kentucky) round out the top ten.
In the top ten list of U.S. cities initiating more risky transactions there are expected results as well as some surprises. While it shouldn’t be shocking that populous cities and financial hubs such as New York, Atlanta, Chicago and L.A. have higher proportions of risky eCommerce transactions, other cities, such as Omaha, ranked higher than expected having higher rates of risky transactions than San Francisco, Dallas and D.C. Many would also expect cities like San Francisco (7) and Miami (11) to rank higher on the list. Miami, Seattle, Austin, Ft. Lauderdale, Sand Diego, Raleigh, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Nashville and Philadelphia are the cities ranked eleventh through twentieth in terms of having the highest percentage of high and medium risk transactions.
For more information: NYC No. 1 In E-Commerce Fraud