If it’s 3 a.m. in Alaska on a Monday—beware those committing fraud.
According to research from Sift Science, 3 a.m. is the fraudiest time of day, regardless of time zone. Also, fraudsters are more likely to transact during the weekdays. Alaska meanwhile has the highest fraud rate based on billing address.
The Midwest has the lowest rate of fraud based on both shipping and billing addresses. However, Massachusetts has the overall lowest rate of fraud.
Delaware, incidentally, has the highest fraud rate based on shipping address.
Sift Science examined a subset of customer data from August 2014 through August 2015, collecting information from 1.3 million transactions that included shipping or billing addresses in the United States. Data was cross-referenced with third-party data from FullContact to identify age and gender, computing fraud rate with the number of fraud users as a fraction of the entire sample size.
“Fraudsters are enjoying success in the ever-changing online playground as the ecommerce marketplace ecosystem grows,” said Jason Tan, CEO and co-founder of Sift Science. “We continue to see fraud behavior consistent across various industries, and reveal identifying factors that help us track and score today’s most advanced fraudsters for our customers. This not only helps our customers understand the risk of each transaction made on their websites, but also automate business decisions based on that risk. As a result, this data not only showcases typical fraudulent behavior, but allows some of today’s premier online retailers to deliver a better customer experience to good users.”
The report also found that men are slightly more likely to be fraudsters than women. And, users identifying themselves to be in the 85-90 age range are two and-a-half times more likely to be fraudsters than the average user.
A user with two-to-four accounts linked to one device is eight times more likely to be fraudulent, and accounts less than three days old are three times more likely to be. Meanwhile, accounts that are two months old are two times more likely to be fraudulent.
Purchases worth $0-25 are twice as likely to be fraudulent, suggesting criminals test stolen credits cards for validity, trying low-value orders.