How To Prevent Fraudulent Ecommerce Transactions | Ecommerce Fraud Tips | B2B Vault: The Payment Technology Podcast | Episode 114

What's up everybody, it's Justin live from B2B Vault, the payment technology podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems with your host Allen Kopelman, and we'll be providing you educational information regarding small business fintech, payment processing, and the technology businesses are using in today's world. And in today's podcast, we'll be talking about fraudulent e-commerce transactions and what businesses can do to try to prevent or at least monitor or, you know, stop them things from continuously happening once they've already happened, what you should do if your site has been hacked or Maybe you've noticed that there's a bunch of transactions that you don't— you have no clue where they came from, you know. I mean, there's a lot of things going on, uh, lots of different ways, uh, of being scammed on the internet, you know. Hackers are getting smarter, not dumber. Um, it's definitely something that, you know, especially if you're a small business, medium-sized business, or a large business, you would, uh, you, you you would be hard pressed into letting that stuff just go, like, you know, your website maintenance and all that other stuff. So, you know, I mean, there's so many different ways of getting, you know, your stuff taken, you know, I can't even tell you. So Allen's got some stuff he wants to talk about in regards to it. And he's got some stories to tell, I'm sure.

Yeah, well, so yeah, there's just been an increase in what we call, you know, people do— going to a website and trying to make a purchase with a real credit card, but it's not their credit card. So you've got to be vigilant. We recently had a few of these go on One couple were small and one was quite large, over about 100,000 transactions. We had another one for 25,000 transactions and another one that was kind of small. And merchants need to understand what they, what they need to do. So we had one place where it's an e-commerce site. Somebody got onto the site and they were doing it almost every day where they were making a purchase, and then they check the purchases to see the shipping addresses is like an actual home or a business, right? Which is good. So they're being vigilant on that. But then the employee that was in charge of fixing, you know, like voiding the transaction out Instead of voiding it, he just removed it from the shopping cart instead of logging into the Gateway and then clicking void.

I mean, I don't know what you're talking about.

Oh, so when you— so like when, when a transaction gets approved, it's approved, but then it doesn't batch out till the— at night.

Okay, right.

So when the batch goes through after that, then you got to do a refund. If you don't do a refund, then somebody's going to do a chargeback. And then you're gonna have a chargeback on your record, and you're gonna get— obviously you got paid the money.

You're talking about in-store though?

And, and what do you mean in store? No, on a website. So let's say you went on a website and you made a purchase with a fake credit card, then I caught it. I caught the purchase. I go, oh, this is not good. Okay, some guy just tried to buy $1,000 worth of gift cards off my website. We determine that it's a fake transaction, and then that right action needs to be taken once you see that you have a fraudulent transaction.

But how would you know it's fraudulent though?

Well, they check the— a lot of merchants that ship quite a bit of things, they check the addresses using maybe like Whitepages or other plugins that they have on their backend of their system. So they can see, like, is that—

I'm just being the devil's advocate for the small business owner here, right?

They want to see, like, is that— like, I get people that call me, how the hell does he have time to do all that? They got employees.

You got a small business owner? Yeah, it has a bunch of employees.

No, just maybe one employee. And if the address doesn't look right, like this on an e-commerce shop, yeah, well, they have a retail store with an e-commerce shop, so they have employees charge of somebody shipping the goods out. Listen, I have single—

I, I've been building websites for 10 years, right?

Okay.

Uh, when I'm building the site for e-commerce guys, yeah, it's one person, right?

But I'm just saying, like, if you're gonna ship it out and you see an address and it says, oh, Suite 201, right, you want to make sure, like, oh, is that a business or am I sending it to a UPS store? Or some kind of mailbox.

I mean, I get what you're saying, but I think there's a lot of— that's, that's difficult to do for a one-man show.

They need to be checking it because that's where 99% of your fraud comes from.

I believe it.

I mean, you know, the, the crazy thing is, is 99% of e-commerce fraud is somebody using a fake credit card, shipping it to some kind of UPS store or some office mailbox place, right? Someone goes in and picks it up, that's it, it's done. Then there's a chargeback, and then you're out your goods and your money. So, you know, you have to come up with a ways to check these— to, to check these addresses, especially if it's a large order. Like recently, we just had one guy, somebody placed an order for $100, then they placed another order for $200, and they shipped it out. The employee shipping out the stuff did not check the address. Then the third time, the guy ordered $3,000 worth of stuff and they shipped it again without checking the address. All three came back as a chargeback. When they checked the address, it was some freight forwarding place. So what happened was, is the package got there, the freight forwarding place— obviously they don't know that the person is a scammer— received the box and then shipped it somewhere else.

I, I don't like that this falls on a small business owner.

It's— it happens to small businesses every—

but if I know, so like, if it's a fake credit card, why is it even being— how can it be processed?

Because the person who doesn't know that they got their credit card information hacked, they're not— they don't— they don't know. So they don't— they don't know that their information was taken, right? Somebody might have got a pic. Maybe they went to a restaurant Someone took a picture front and back of their credit card because the place isn't using like pay-at-the-table technology. Someone snapped a picture of the front and the back, and then, uh, they got the person's name, looked up their address, and then made a fake purchase and then had shipped to another address. And then the person's not checking their credit card bill all the time, man.

It's— I'm sorry, small business owners, that you got to go through all this, but yeah, it's horrible.

But I mean, it's like You know, you have this place that, that an employee that's like packing the stuff up and shipping it, and that person's supposed to be supposed to check the address.

How is he supposed to check the address?

Well, first of all, when you get— when you're doing a transaction, you're going to have an AVS response and a zip response.

So the AVS, if it goes through with the right zip, then, then how are you— how would you ever know that it's not the right address?

But maybe they're shipping to a different address.

I do that all the time, right?

Well, the website—

so when you say that you want to ship to a different address, what are they going to say? No.

Some places do, depending on the size of the transaction. I mean, obviously $100 and $200 is not going to put up a flag, but $3,000 is.

I mean, 3,000 units of anything would, you know, right?

You know, and you're a small business.

How often— didn't come today, right?

No, but I'm saying how often is somebody ordering 3,000.

Yeah, I mean, that would be a flag, right? I mean, so, I mean, I don't know, I— but for me, when you're setting up an e-commerce store, yeah, you have a limit that you can set, right?

I get that. Per purchase?

No, like transactions in a period of time, right?

A velocity limit.

Exactly. So like, if you don't have the proper developer setting that stuff up, I feel bad for you. You know, you— I, I mean, well, that's— this is just one of those things where every— like, small business owners are always trying to wear every hat. They want to be the developer, they want to be the designer, they want to be the graphic designer, they want to be the marketing guy, they want to be the social media guy, they want to be the content creator, they want to be the videographer, they want to go shoot the photos. They want to be the data that you obviously—

I can't wear all those hats. That's why I have employees. Yeah, no, but at the same time, you know, some businesses, they have employees, and that, you know, the person in charge of shipping needs to look at the address and go, hey, we only ship to businesses, and this is going to some freight forwarding warehouse. You're going to get scammed. Like, I had a merchant one time and somebody ordered um, 2 pairs of shoes. They shipped it to the guy, then the guy called up and he ordered like 50 pairs of shoes. And then they called me on the phone and I said, listen, you're gonna— that's gonna be a chargeback. There's no way. It's going to a UPS store, right? That's a known— the 2 biggest things to get chargeback is shipping to a UPS store or some office suite place. That's one. And the second biggest one is freight forwarders.

Freight forwarder.

Oh, a freight forwarder is, let's say, um, I call you up, a freight— you, you have a warehouse and you receive goods for businesses, and maybe those businesses are in a house. Could be legit, but it's that somebody— maybe it's at a house and they're going to get like something large and they're going to come over there and pick it up with their truck, or maybe it doesn't fit in their business. Or maybe they're shipping it out of the country or whatever they're doing with it. But freight forwarding is, is a huge scam. It's a problem. So anytime somebody's trying to buy something from you and then they say, oh, a freight forwarder is going to come pick it up, or you're— you look at the shipping address and it's going to a freight forwarder, uh, I would think that's 90% of the time that's probably you're gonna get scammed. The same thing with UPS stores. If I told you in 20 years how many times I've heard from a merchant where they ship stuff to a UPS store and then had a huge chargeback of $1,000, $3,000, $5,000, $20,000, $30,000— once a guy selling computers got jammed up for $30 grand shipping to a UPS store. Done. The stuff was gone. No way to track who the person is, right?

It's terrible.

Yeah, it's terrible, but businesses have to figure it out. I mean, I wish like UPS or FedEx, like, you know, you're using the like that shipping software, I wish that it somehow like said, hey, look, it like popped up like a little button so you could look and see what address that is, like, is that a good address or God. But they don't, they don't do that, you know, and it's not good. And there's a lot of, you know, there's just a lot of scammy stuff going on. Or, you know, you have another incident that happened recently where somebody had on a website where you could make a donation, and the donation amount— I told them they should make a minimum donation amount They didn't want to do that. They said, what if someone wants to donate a dollar? I said, then make it a dollar. And what happened was somebody found the website— how, I don't know— they wrote a script and then they ran about 30,000 credit cards on there for a penny. And then what ends up happening is, you know, the credit card processor maybe can show a little bit of a little bit of, uh, charity towards the business owner and not charge them for all the transaction fees, right? Or maybe cut it down, whatever they were paying. But, uh, the Gateway is not going to do that. If you had 30,000 transactions at a dime, that's going to be $3,000 of costs coming your way, because every time there's a transaction There's an email.

There's something that needs to be fixed there, right?

Well, the first of all, the merchant, we told them to have velocity settings on the website, on their website, not just, not just on the, not just in the gateway, but also on the website. So the gateways have velocity settings, so you can put in there 10 transactions an hour, 20 transactions a day. You can have, you know, those kind of velocity settings, plus you can have it in your shopping cart too, which you should have it set on both, right? And then the other thing is, is that—

and you should set your limit for, you know, like you can say that, you know, you're— you can only put $2,000 of product into your cart, whatever it is. I don't know, you can limit that amount too, right? So you're not responsible for whatever.

Yeah, you just need to have an idea. Like, if the average person— if the average charge on your website is, let's say, $200 or $100, and then someone orders $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 worth of product, okay, it's worth, like, taking that— the time. It's definitely worth taking your time, taking the time, Google the address and see where that's going, and then making sure, like, hey, What was the AVS response? What was the zip code response? Did they put in the CVV2 number?

I don't know if they know. Most people aren't going to know what that is, Allen.

Well, in the gate— I try to train them. When I train people, I'd say, look, in the gateway there's a lot of settings in there for like how transactions flow, right? And I try to train them, you know, try— we can only train people how to, how to use the available tools. Right?

But you're assuming that these people are going to do that.

Well, I try— well, we explain it to them and we hope that they're going to do it. We hope, right? And the other thing is, is you're getting an email every time someone does a transaction.

You would assume—

no, you are. Who is that going to? Needs to be somebody.

That's what I mean by that, right? Would assume that you're the business owner is getting somebody an email.

Yeah, somebody, the business owner and whoever else is supposed to be in charge of the website Shit, if all of a sudden they see a ton of emails coming through, right, that's time to pull the plug on the website and shut that thing down because someone is doing, you know, some kind of attack. And what are these attacks? They're testing card numbers to see if they're good. They could be testing a BIN number, which is the first— when you see a credit card, you have the first 4 digits, and then there's, there's 4 sets of 4 digits, right? For Visa and MasterCard. American Express has an extra digit or one less, I don't remember, but the first 6 identifies the BIN. So sometimes they just want to see if they can exploit somebody's BIN, and they'll make a bunch of random numbers after the first 6 when they think they have some— a BIN that might be at a bank that's not monitoring their BIN. And there's so many— not like— can't— like, if you compare United States to like Canada, Europe, Australia, and those countries that have maybe 10 credit card issuers, right? Europe has a few more than that, but they don't have like in the US, there's tens of thousands of credit card issuers. So there's all these bins. And then you have what they call the brute force attack, or you could have like a phishing attack, or somebody says, maybe you use invoicing software. And somebody says, oh yeah, I need to pay my invoice, blah, blah, blah, send me that link. And then you send out the link thinking that's one of your customers. Meanwhile, they kind of hacked your email or something, right? And then you send them the link to pay an invoice, and then they run a bot on it, and you could have thousands and thousands of transactions. I mean, we have one we're dealing with now, it's almost 100,000 transactions. I had to call the bank. I said, get the risk department on the phone, we got to stop the batch. It was just an insane amount of transactions. I, when I saw it, my, I almost like my heart stopped because nobody wants to deal with that. Thank God it's a very large company. They're going to be slightly upset, but we're going to do what we can. Um, they're not— somebody is not assigned to monitor the website, and or the person who's supposed to be set at monitoring the security on the site Not nobody monitored it. Nobody. That's the part— most of the time that's what happens. Somebody sees these emails coming into their email and they ignore it, or they don't look at it over the weekend or whatever it is, and it— and then the problem happens. And I've seen it happen probably a couple of dozen times in 20 years. And you know, somebody gets on there and you You know, they're getting really smart because I was talking to the security department this morning and they were like, you know, they put CAPTCHA controls like on the checkout process and they go, they don't know how these guys are doing it. They're, they're, they're using, um, different IP addresses for each transaction and rolling these IPs.

It's easy now. I got— they— as soon as they made it AI you run a script, you know, they know, click on all the bicycles. It's got keywords built into the script, bicycles. So it just clicks every image that has a bicycle in it. It's not— I mean, I don't know, man.

Yeah, it's crazy. But whatever, they figured out a way now to get around CAPTCHAs, which is insane. I wish that they would just go to the system, like, Europe uses where somebody does a transaction and it forces a text message to go to the owner's credit card, and then the transaction doesn't go through. I don't know why United States of America, Visa and MasterCard of the United States, and all the gateways out there— I don't know why this step has not been added. The only company that has it is Shopify. Like when you make a purchase on Shopify, it sends you a code to your phone. You have to put it in. So someone tries to—

Google Pay does that too.

Yeah. And also like Apple Pay sends a little thing to your phone. You have to do that to— okay, you have to put your face to the phone or whatever.

I wouldn't— I don't know.

No, I'm just saying, whatever you have on your phone. But you have to, you know, you've got to figure out how to— you got to set up monitoring for your website. You just can't go along and not have somebody monitoring the email address that's attached to the website.

I mean, look, when you leave your house, do you lock your door?

Yeah, I lock my door.

So when you leave your website, you know, unlocked, you know, in a sense, what do you think is going to happen? So yeah, I mean, the e-commerce thing is, it's always, I don't know, I've actually like in web development, personally, I've been one of those guys who kind of stays away from it if the project isn't right, because I know that the budget ends up being right, nothing. And it's a big waste of time. And but yeah, I mean, these bigger projects that I've put together definitely have been made, made a point of letting them know that you have to pay for maintenance. You have to pay for a maintenance plan after this. I mean, they were selling, uh, one of the companies, they're selling audio equipment, and, um, there was products that were $5,000 on there, right? You know what I mean? Yeah. So they understood, they got it. Like, you know, they were, they were veterans of the music and audio equipment industry. So they understood, like, that's not their first big website. But, you know, for an artist, for instance, they don't think that it's that important. You know, they think that, well, not maybe that it's not that important, or that it's not like high on their to-do list.

They might think, who's gonna attack my site?

Exactly. But as soon as they see that weakness in, you know, whatever content management system you're using, it's just like a green light for everyone to come. And, you know, if they see a weakness, they're going to tell everybody about it too. You know, it's not like just, oh, I'm gonna hold on to this. No, no, no, no, no, they're gonna pass that around until you figure out what's going on. Yeah, that is too late.

Yeah, because they're gonna go— they're gonna go nuts on this one website. They did a few hundred transactions, and then the next day they did almost 100,000 transactions. When I saw it this morning— the website—

how would you even— I'm disappointed in whoever's running that.

Well, no, like whoever their IT person is, right? And whoever's monitoring the email from that site.

Either he was very, uh, unhappy and they weren't paying him enough, or They just said forget it. I don't know, dude, that's crazy.

I'm sorry, it kind of like, it scared me because I, you know, and I don't like to pass blame or ask any questions, but you know, I said like, who monitors that?

And the people were like, what does that mean?

They didn't know, they didn't answer me. I go, does somebody monitor the email account on this website? Like, every time there's a transaction, someone needs to be— that email needs to go to— if it, if it's not going to— if it's going— if it needs to go to 3 or 4 people, set it up so it goes to 3 or 4 people.

Well, if— I mean, so this is— I don't know, right? Yeah, they're just assuming here. Um, I'm not even assuming. Uh, but if they had run a script on it, wouldn't they have just like made that bounce back to them so that they would have not known that this was happening?

No, because when that Every time you do a transaction, the gateway sends an email. Yeah, sends an email to whoever's on the admin side.

I get that. I'm just thinking like on the website though, like, right? So if you're— I don't know, like, I'm not a hacker, so I don't know how this works, right? So like, in my mind, if I was hacking your website and I was trying to run 100,000 transactions I would make it seem like it was never happening. Does that make sense?

You could make it seem like it's not happening because maybe if somebody's monitoring the traffic to the site, they would also saw a ton of traffic coming into the website. I don't know how— I have no idea what this— these people— how these people monitor their websites, okay? I'm not just telling you, like, we don't sit down with somebody, go Oh, how do you monitor your website? You don't ask— we don't ask that question. We just explain to them, hey, you need to set these things up, you know, and you got to make sure that on the back end, if you see something, we try to educate them, right? Listen, if you're— if you own an e-commerce website, you should have the email set up that whoever is in charge of your website You know, maybe it's the owner, maybe there's one or two other people, right, that they're all getting these emails. And then all of a sudden, if you see a flurry of emails coming in of transactions declined, declined, declined, a whole bunch of transactions, and that's not supposed to be happening, you pick up your phone on the weekend, you go, oh, there's a whole bunch of transactions. There needs to be like a phone number to call and say, hey, shut the website down.

I mean, I'm guessing someone at that company realized like, yo, we just sold 100,000 units this weekend, what's going on?

I don't know. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying.

And, you know, so I can't stand lazy people.

Well, it's not that— I don't know. I don't know if it's lazy. I think it's more like— I think it— I think it's just— it's just that people don't think it's going to happen to them. It's being lazy.

Well, you can make an excuse for it.

No, I'm just saying they don't think it's going to happen to them, and somebody's not vigilantly checking that email account.

Being lazy.

Well, we'll call— I don't want to point fingers at anybody.

Pointing fingers at all you lazy— never mind.

But you know, you gotta, you gotta watch for these things, and you also have to watch for it. We're coming into now what, we're in October, you know, we got November coming up, December, Christmas shopping is going to start. This is when fraud is going to be at its highest, you know, the highest time of the year, the fraudsters are going to come out, especially— we just had a hurricane here in Florida. We're gonna hear all kinds of crazy stories about people getting ripped off with the—

people are already trying to rip off the government.

Yeah, ripping off the government, filing fake claims saying, you know, they're whatever, they maybe don't even live there and they found somebody.

I've seen online someone said 'Do you have your—

I hope you guys got your Florida addresses ready.' I'm like, 'Dude, you're just gonna scam your way through life forever.' Yeah, people will go file a claim, they'll find an address on a map, they'll say, 'Oh, that whole street got destroyed,' and then they'll file a FEMA claim, and then they'll get it, and they'll say, 'I moved in another state, right? I had to move.' And then all of a sudden FEMA is going to go just send them a check willy-nilly. You know, I hope, I hope FEMA makes people do that thing like when I had to go do my taxes last year, they had this new thing called ID.me. Yeah, and I had to answer all these questions.

And ID.me.

Yeah, ID.me. I hope FEMA's using that so that they don't get scammed. Well, the public will get scammed out of millions of dollars like they did with everything else because they don't have any controls on anything at the government. But at the same time, you know, this is the time of the year we're coming up. If, if you have an e-commerce website, you know, start to think about like, say, hey, I'm going to log into my gateway. No matter what gateway you're using— Auth.net, uh, NMI, FluidPay— there's a gazillion of them, okay? There's hundreds of gateways. And make sure, like, oh, is there velocity settings in there? Are they turned on? Is there velocity settings set up on my shopping cart software? Do I have security software that on my website that's going to monitor, like, if there's a whole bunch of traffic on there, right? 50,000 people went on my website and you don't get that kind of business. Is there something that's going to set off an alarm and and send somebody an email that's going to go shut down you. So you can go shut down your website or shut off your gateway or shut down your shopping cart so you don't end up with a huge bill because you're going to get whacked for 10 cents a transaction from the credit card processor because whatever, you're being lazy or you don't have something set up. The same thing, you don't want to get ripped off. Well, if somebody— or end up with a bunch of chargebacks Somebody comes on your website, orders $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 worth of goods, and your normal transaction size is $50 to $100, you know, oh, you see that, those large transactions, you should be saying, hey, maybe we need to call this customer on the phone. Uh, what is— is the address a legitimate address? You know, I saw Justin's story. I had a neighbor of mine that got Uh, he came up from work after a business trip. He used to travel a lot. So I was telling you this story, right? And he lived on the end of the street, which was at the front of my community. And somebody must have been watching this guy, that he traveled a lot, and they knew like his pattern, and he was gone for quite a bit, right? And he didn't have cameras outside his house. And somebody, what they were doing was they would have stuff delivered to this guy's house. They just knew probably wasn't home during the day, at least. So they would have packages delivered by FedEx and UPS to this house, and they were ordering rims, tires, all sorts of really expensive stuff. And UPS, they just throw this, leave it on the front porch. And because the guy lived in the front of the community, even though it was gated, there was like a gate you could walk through, or they just went through the bushes right up to the guy's front door. No one could see them because they came through the bushes, and then they just had a van parked on the other side of the bushes, and they just took all this stuff. And they were doing it for weeks, and they must have hit somebody— some, uh, they hit some automotive places, automotive like supply, okay, place, like a bunch of times, ordering like a lot of stuff. And that place, I guess, called the cops, you know. And then the police were surveilling this house, and, you know, they caught these guys. And then my friend came home from work, and there was— I was outside walking my dog, and there was cops everywhere. And he was like, what's going on? I'm like, what's, what's going on? Apparently, whatever, there was a major ring going on. They weren't just doing it at his house, they were doing it all over the neighborhoods. I lived in a, in a big development area, so each small neighborhood had its own like gate to come in. And these people must have been watching the houses to see like, oh, who's not home at these houses that are like by the gate, by the front gate.

Criminals are smart, man.

And they were dropping stuff off all over the area over there. Everywhere. And there was one community where there was, um, just, um, I think they were like, they were like townhouses, and that one didn't even have a gate on it. And they were just, they were just get packed, you know, like porch pirates, but not really porch pirate because they weren't stealing other people's packages.

It's crazy.

They were getting stuff delivered deliberately to these addresses and then taking stuff because it was an area where people went to work. So nobody's like really home. And you know, you get a FedEx at, you know, FedEx comes, let's say, 10 o'clock in the morning and everybody's pretty much working. Nobody's around, maybe only a few people, right? Yeah. And if it's a house where the front door is kind of like obscured with bushes, like this guy's house, boom, easy pickings. Easy. Yeah, they were just stealing stuff left. They were stealing stuff left and right at it. You know, having it delivered. And, uh, yeah, they finally caught the people. Apparently it was into the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. But you got to be really careful if you have a website. You got to make sure you got what, SiteLock software on your site. I don't know what other things you can have on WordPress. What kind of plugins, Justin?

Um, I use, uh, security and Wordfence, right? They both have premium and free versions. There's a lot of different tools that you can use, but, you know, your server should have some sort of site lock on it, where it's hosted at. You should definitely have backup subscription services to your website in case a disaster like that happens.

What's that? Backup subscription service?

Uh, just so that your website is— the files, the database is being backed up.

Oh yeah.

So then if it does get hacked, that you can restore it to the previous version of when it wasn't hacked, right? Um, I mean, my most important advice, like, you can have all this stuff, right, already installed, you can have every setting set. But if you don't log into your— I'm talking WordPress. I'm a WordPress developer. And that's what I am. That's it.

Yeah, well, WordPress is million— most— a lot of websites use WordPress. Yeah, especially entrepreneurs, right?

So for WordPress in general, you know, there's a setting in there for you to auto update. Your plugins. I don't suggest that because your— that plugin can auto-update and then your site gets broken because it's not compatible with the theme you're using or another plugin you're using, or your server, your hosting provider isn't ready for that version of it. There's just a lot of variables. I don't personally ever set— well, I'll never— I don't— I personally don't set auto update on all the stuff, right? Like there's certain plugins I know that, you know, that are real lightweight for the site that'll do it. But my point is, you got to log into the site daily. I mean, you can set a reminder in your phone and say, hey, log into b2bvault.info at 12:15 this afternoon. Just to check, you know, click the update button, run the updates, clear your cache. I don't know, man. I mean, there's a lot of things that you should do. But there's one thing that I just— maintain your site. Like, if you don't have the money to pay someone like myself to, you know, manage your site like you should, there's a lot of videos on YouTube for you to watch.

And use the velocity settings on the gateway and the velocity settings in the shopping cart.

And all for sure. But yeah, man, just manage your website, update it regularly. Always, never just think that it's okay, because it's not. I don't care what plugin that you have installed on WordPress. Nothing is foolproof. And like I said earlier, hackers are getting smarter, they're not getting stupider. So It's easier and easier for them to access our sites. So yeah, man, maintenance is key. That's what I would say. That's my advice. The security thing is, of course, that's, you know, crucial, kind of a no-brainer thing. But, but the big thing, maintenance, the maintenance and monitoring of your website is monitoring your email from happening.

Like monitor your email. If you have an e-commerce website, or you have a a site where someone can go pay bills on it, monitor the email address. Somebody needs to be monitoring it, you know, pretty much— I don't want to say 24 hours a day, but it needs to be getting monitored.

If you're a small business owner, you would pretty— I don't know, man. I guess I'm built different. I, yeah, I monitor my stuff. I care too much, maybe. You know, if I had a brick and mortar, I would have every security monitoring there Cameras everywhere. I have cameras on top of cameras. There'd be a camera going directly to my phone. Like, I mean, so with the website thing, like, I'm always aware, right? Like, I have an email, I have it. So the notification for like my personal email is different from all the other notifications. So if I know if an email comes from WordPress to me, I know that, oh, this is from my site, I need to check that. Right, right. Bluehost, my hosting provider, they have their own. So I know when, if I get an email from them, you know, it's like, oh, I should pay attention to this, because this is from— it's just a— but that also, this also comes with 10 years of doing it, right? You know, I mean, I've been fortunate and I have many sites hacked, you know, and none of them have been an e-commerce site, because I would take precautions for that, you know. I just don't want to deal with that problem. Dealing with it, you know, the small amount of time it's going to take you to set up the preventative stuff is nothing in comparison to the time it's going to take to try to get you back up to where you were. Like, I've seen so many websites get hacked because they, you know, they didn't do what we're telling— talking about, like there's no maintenance going on. And then they call me and they're like, well, I need my site back. And I can't get you— what do you want me to do?

Yeah, we had somebody, remember that? When you first started here, we had somebody. And what did they do? They didn't renew their domain name, right? And then their site disappeared. And we were just basically helping them maintain the site, but they didn't want us to have the login and all this stuff, right? So they went in, they didn't pay the bill, and they called us on the phone and they go, oh, the website, the website disappeared. Well, thank goodness we had it hosted on a, uh, on a platform that had the site backed up.

Oh yeah.

And then we were able to— they had to go pay for the domain name even though it expired, then we had to reconnect it to the site. Reconnect it to the, to the, uh, that's nothing.

That was nothing.

No, but it was a few couple of days of work to get it all back up and running, and then, you know, and then make a bunch of update changes and stuff. And then there was—

we had to make a few changes because just a pain in the neck of like finding the—

yeah, because some of the info wasn't backed up.

I don't know. I mean, I wasn't managing.

Well, we don't know because it wasn't— it was during the pandemic, so weren't really paying attention. The site wasn't being used. It was an informational site for an organization. And they forgot to— they forgot to pay the bill. And then the website disappeared. So you got to be careful with, you know, your website, maintaining it, and making sure that, that whoever— that somebody— that more than one person is looking at those type of things like the orders, the order size, and different things like that. It's very, very important. So if you need help with e-commerce security, e-commerce merchant account, you want to learn more about what you could do to prevent fraud, or at least try to prevent fraud, because we can't stop the hackers, they're, they're just getting crazy right now, is, uh, you know, you can contact us Click the word book. Oh no, go to 954-827-9818 and text the word book, right, to 954-827-9818.

Or head over to b2bvault.info. If you need a merchant account, click Apply Now. There's some questions for you to answer, hit the ground running, right? About 10 minutes. Yeah, man, follow us on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn @B2BVault, The Payment Technology Podcast. You can listen to us on Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, YouTube, Stitcher, iHeart—

the list goes on and on. Wherever you listen to podcasts, we're probably on there.

No, we are. We're available everywhere.

All right, peace out everybody. Have a great day and keep on trucking.