news round-up
UK Retail Fraud Survey Findings announced
The annual Retail Fraud survey, conducted by Retail Knowledge, asked 104 questions of retailers with 43,000 stores and representing 52 per cent of retailers in the UK.
Overall, shrink has increased by 1.1 per cent from 0.9 per cent of sales in the previous year and cost the industry £5.3 billion.
Trends spotted by the 2015 survey include retailers still separating store and online losses, although this is not something that fraudsters do, and the prediction that online sales will increase from 12 per cent to 31 per cent in the next three years.
The biggest area of loss is still shoplifting, followed by employee theft and online fraud. It also reported that 43 per cent of scams are generated by fraudulent credit cards
A total of 33 per cent of respondents said that fraud detection was their biggest concern with return fraud up by 125 per cent.
In terms of investment, fraud prevention accounts for £68 million of sales and 65 per cent of stores use manned guarding across an average of 10 per cent of their estates.
Up and coming trends include data theft, but only one retailer said they were actively looking at it.
For more information on the Retail Fraud survey, please visit www.retailfraud.com
