High-Risk Countries for Online Transactions

I read a recent news that correlated the increase in online e-commerce fraud during times of economic crisis. I guess that is to be expected as people become more desperate -- not that I'm condoning it.

In any case, one of the tools commonly used by payment gateways (including PayEasy Online Payment System) is to use MaxMind's GeoIP database to map IP addresses to geographical location. Sometimes, you can pinpoint the IP address right down to the specific state or city. But I don't find it that accurate. So most of the time, we just settle on determining the country where the user is in, given the IP address that appears. Its not a perfect science but its better than nothing.

In any case, a recent study listed the following as the top countries for online fraud (not sure if its in any particular order):

• Romania
• Bulgaria
• Lithuania
• Kazakhstan
• Ukraine
• Ivory Coast
• Nigeria
• Ghana
• Egypt
• Pakistan
• Macedonia
• Lebanon
  

To safeguard PayEasy merchants, we do not automatically open all countries for receiving payments from. We normally just default to the common/familiar first world countries. Only if the merchant is sure they want to receive payments from specific countries do we open the rest of the world.