Higher Security Standards: Merar Has Improved Its Payment Verification Process

Merar is introducing a triple validation procedure to protect its online community from credit card fraud and online scam.

Sadly, communication and business-making through the Internet is continuously being hampered by the rising wave of online fraud. The field of investment seeking, where money and sensitive information are on the table, is particularly vulnerable. Yet, we at Merar have decided not to let things go but to actively fight fraudulent behaviour and do everything we can to protect from scam our members and the online community as a whole.

We are learning how to deal with fraudulent investors and Internet scam from the industry’s best practices, the feedback of our members and our own experience. Here are the measures we have implemented so far:

• Restraining the exposure of contact information on the public website
• Making contacts establishment a paid service for the contact initiators
• Delegating the payment processing to an external professional payment gatewayIntroducing technologies enabling us to identify suspicious behaviour online
• Establishing personal contact to all investors who publish an offer on our website
• Integrating a Rating and Feedback System to keep us updated on the progress of the connections established within the Merar community

We are glad to see that our measures are paying off: we managed to significantly reduce the online fraud and scam attempts on Merar.

However, we have to inform you that recently we had the unpleasant experience of dealing with unauthorized credit card payments by fraudulent investor members. Unfortunately, we became aware of the suspicious behaviour of the user only after the payment was made. The only thing we could do is to return the payment and warn the project owners whose contacts were purchased. In our understanding this this is not a sufficient problem solving mechanism for the future and we feel the need of further improvement on the security matter.

We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience the fraud attempt has caused to our members and immediately go for stricter verification measures.

To keep you and the rest of the Merar community well protected, we are introducing a Triple Verification Process for all payments to our website. Triple stands for validation of the payment from three sides:

• Our payment gateway provider (G2S)
• Our in-house team
• Respective credit card issuing institution.

The aim is to ensure that the credit card used for the payment is not in the wrong hands.

Even in the brick and mortar world it is hard to confirm that the customer on the cashier is indeed the owner of the credit card they provide. Just imagine how challenging this is in the case of a global online business. Challenging, yet not impossible. We believe that our measure will be effective in dealing with online and credit card fraud and ask you for your patience (the bank authorization might take few days), as well as your feedback and recommendations.

In the meanwhile, we advise you to be careful when dealing with people you don’t know and to ask your potential partners to tell more about themselves before you disclose any sensitive information. Although it might sound intuitive to you, we feel obliged to notify you once again: Don’t provide your bank details or transfer money to people you don’t know and who haven’t proved to you their serious business intentions and reliability.

We would also recommend you to (again) have a look at an article on the topic we published several months ago, called 7 Steps of How to Protect Yourself from Fraudulent Investors and Internet Scam.