On 12 April 2019, Mastercard’s new regulation designated negative option billing merchants that provide physical products as high-risk merchants. This means they must be registered by the acquirer through the Mastercard Registration Program (MRP). Accordingly, it is crucial that the acquirer knows if their merchants offers subscriptions/trials and performs the MRP registration accordingly.

This is where Deceptive Marketing Detection can help: it screens merchant website traffic sources for known deceptive marketing characteristics like the mention of ‘risk-free trials’, high pressure sales tactics like timers, price draws, and more.

Deceptive Traffic Detection helps underwriting teams to automate a lot of steps that could only be done manually before:

• it reviews and analyses all backlinks of a website to identify high-risk MCCs as defined by the credit card associations;

• finds consumer warnings or fraud alerts;

• looks for deceptive marketing keywords like ‘risk-free trial’;

• classifies the sources of external traffic generation (social media, email, display ads, referral/affiliate traffic) and ferrets out dead links.

Web Shield equips the payments industry with tools that protect businesses from merchants involved in illegal or non-compliant activities. To find out more about this company, please visit our dedicated web fraud & e-identity company database.