iovation Finds Online Travel Fraud Heats Up During Summer Months

PORTLAND, OR--(Marketwired - Jun 15, 2016) - iovation, the provider of device intelligence for authentication and fraud prevention, today released intelligence around online summer travel transactions. The company found that overall and mobile transactions for booking flights, hotels and rental cars increase significantly over the summer months of June, July and August. In addition, iovation found that fraudulent activity against the online travel companies it protects goes up during the summer. iovation based these findings on its analysis of the hundreds of millions of online travel transactions and billions of total transactions that it screens for fraudulent indicators every year.

Specifically, iovation broke down summer transaction trends by:

• Total Transactions - More online travel transactions occurred during the summer months.
  
  The amount of online travel transactions during an average summer month in 2015 was eight percent higher than a typical month the rest of the year, 39 percent higher in 2014 and three percent higher in 2013.
  
  
• Mobile Usage - During the summer, travel transactions from mobile devices increased at a higher rate than transactions from non-mobile devices.
  
  Travel transactions conducted from a mobile device during an average summer month in 2015 were 14 percent higher than a typical month the rest of the year, 40 percent higher in 2014 and 36 percent higher in 2013.
  
  
• Travel Fraud - More fraudulent online travel transactions occurred during the summer months.
  
  The amount of fraudulent online travel transactions during an average summer month in 2015 was nine percent higher than a typical month the rest of the year, nine percent higher in 2014 and 23 percent higher in 2013.
  
  
• Mobile Fraud - More fraudulent travel transactions originating from a mobile device occurred during the summer months.
  
  Much like legitimate mobile purchases, online travel fraud originating from a mobile device increased during the summer months. It increased 18 percent during an average summer month in 2015, 11 percent in 2014 and 23 percent in 2013.
  
  
• Device Type - Android devices saw the largest increase in online travel transactions conducted from them during an average summer month in 2015 (16 percent) compared to a typical month the rest of the year followed by iPhones (13 percent). In 2014, Windows desktops and laptops (39 percent) saw the biggest increase followed by Macs (36 percent). In 2013, iPhones saw the biggest increase (59 percent) followed by Android phones (57 percent).
  

"Our research shows that when people are out and about in the summer, they like to use their mobile device to book their travel and fraudsters like to do the same," said iovation's Chief Technology Officer, Scott Waddell. "This intelligence from our global crime fighting community of thousands of fraud analysts empowers companies to fight the criminals that are impacting their bottom lines and consumers' wallets."

For more data and an infographic around iovation's findings, go to iovation.com/stories/summer-travel-fraud.

About iovation
iovation protects online businesses and their end users against fraud and abuse, and identifies trustworthy customers through a combination of advanced device identification, shared device reputation, device-based authentication and real-time risk evaluation. More than 3,500 fraud managers representing global retail, financial services, insurance, social network, gaming and other companies leverage iovation's database of billions of Internet devices and the relationships between them to determine the level of risk associated with online transactions. The company's device reputation database is the world's largest, used to protect 15 million transactions and stop an average of 300,000 fraudulent activities every day. The world's foremost fraud experts share intelligence, cybercrime tips and online fraud prevention techniques in iovation's Fraud Force Community, an exclusive virtual crime-fighting network. For more information, visit iovation.com.