How a blog post about fraud prevention saved an East Africa travel company from becoming victims of online fraud

K from a safari company that uses Direct Pay Online’s online payment platform received an online inquiry for a booking in one of their luxury camps in the Serengeti for $21,000. The inquiry struck him as strange since it came in to an old email address that was no longer published on their website. After he went ahead and confirmed the reservation to the client, the client emailed back saying that he is a ‘travel agent’ from UK and as soon as his client pays, he would like K to send him his commission via western union. K noticed that the email was different from the first one he had used.

As K was going through his normal day he logged in to the Direct Pay Online website, and saw our blog post (Just Another Day of Online Fraud Prevention). As he read the blog he suspected that the inquiry he had received was fraudulent, since he had received an email from the Agent telling him that they would like to pay using 7 different credit cards. K immediately contacted us and we advised him to send seven links for the client to pay and we assured him we will monitor the transactions from our end and advice if they are fraudulent or not.

In parallel K was also doing his own back ground checks and he found out that the address the Agent had given was a bed and breakfast hotel in the UK. And we also verified the transactions as fraud and immediately issued refunds and blocked the customer.

We asked him how the Direct Pay Online fraud team handled the matter and he said: “I received excellent service and I will sing up all my other businesses with you, as now I see that you do your best to prevent any fraud from happening, and you end up protecting both me and the innocent card holder.