The history of retail is also the history of evolving patterns of fraud. Human nature being what it is, there are always individuals who try to cheat the system and get something for nothing. In recent years, retail fraud attempts have grown most dramatically in card-not-present transactions, thanks to the rise of e- and m-Commerce and the introduction of security chips in physical cards.
Merchants tend to respond to rising fraud risk in two distinctive ways: investing heavily in set-and-forget fraud prevention, or rejecting any transaction that seems questionable. Both strategies have failed.
