A NEWTOWN businessman is warning other businesses to be wary of ‘customer not present’ card payment transactions.

Mark Barnes, Managing Director of Electride and Revive and Drive, the electric bike and electric scooter business on the Mochdre Industrial Estate, has recently been the victim of fraud costing the business more than £2,500.

Scammers have twice made telephone purchases where staff at Electride processed card transactions only to find out weeks later that these transactions were fraudulent. Customer not present transactions do not carry the same level of security as pin entry transactions.

Mr Barnes said “We spoke with two separate individuals who called to enquire about buying our electric bikes and scooters over the phone. They were perfectly pleasant and even tried to negotiate the price in an attempt to appear authentic.

"The payments were authorised at the time via our card terminal so we thought that there was no need to be concerned”

Mr Barnes added: “I even personally delivered one of the purchases myself and met the man who was clearly robbing me in broad daylight."

Both of the fraudulent transactions were from people in Manchester and Mr Barnes says businesses are having to be more imaginative in the current trading conditions and ecommerce will be the future for a great many retail businesses.

He is encouraging other businesses to learn from this and to only accept ‘customer not present’ payments by PayPal, BACs payments and via online ecommerce solutions using payment platforms such as Stripe.

The Police are looking into both cases, but typical business insurance does not cover theft in this way as this would only be covered by very expensive and specific fraud insurance.