PayPal Works To Crack Down On Cyberthieves

With projected internet shopping this holiday season reaching as high as $91 billion globally, the goals for most consumers is to pay for all those goods without getting ripped off. While some shoppers rely on the inherent protections offered by their credit card companies, many rely on an escrow-style online payment system like PayPal. So how does PayPal plan to protect its customers from fraud and scams this holiday season?

By kicking it old school. Yes, by having actual humans monitoring global transactions around the clock. Of course, there are algorithms in place that help those carbon-based life forms know which transactions to look over more closely, essentially sending an alert to the worker’s computer screen and advising them to investigate that particular transaction a little more cautiously.

PayPal is taking a lesson from years’ past, especially last year’s Cyber Monday in which the service was processing as much as $25,000 in transactions every second. That’s a lot of money and a lot of opportunity for fraud to slip through, especially if the company is unprepared for the onslaught of spending; the higher than expected volume of transactions caused PayPal’s site to crash, preventing a small number of consumers from spending with their preferred payment method. Of course, the October DDoS attack also halted things in their tracks for PayPal, something else that the company doesn’t plan to let happen again.

As for moving forward, the service hopes that keeping a 24/7 eye on transactions can help stop cybercrime before it has a chance to take hold. As organizations like the Identity Theft Resource Center and the Federal Trade Commission can attest to, discovering crimes of this nature at the moment they’re happening is far more effective and easier to recover from in the long run than trying to clean up the aftermath.

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