• Faraz Khalid is the former Co-founder and Managing Director of Namshi, the leading online fashion retailer in the Middle East

• Noon, the region’s game-changing e-commerce platform, is set for launch later this year

Noon, the Middle East’s soon to be launched e-commerce platform, founded by Mohamed Alabbar, has announced the appointment of Faraz Khalid as its Chief Executive Officer. Faraz is the former Co-founder and Managing Director of Namshi, the Middle East’s leading fashion online retailer Namshi. Faraz has assumed office at Noon, steering its launch later this year.

With proven experience and hands-on knowledge in building, launching and scaling successful e-commerce enterprises in the region, Faraz will lead a team of dedicated professionals in driving the operations of Noon. He is mandated to bring Noon to market by establishing long-term strategic partnerships, enhancing Noon’s infrastructure capabilities especially in Saudi Arabia, and building a robust technology platform that enables a world class customer experience.

Mohamed Alabbar, founder of Noon, said: “We are on track to launch Noon this year with the final work on the fulfilment infrastructure and payment systems being completed. Several of the region’s leading brand owners and suppliers have come on board, underlining our local strength. 

Faraz has built a successful e-commerce business in the region, and brings the right domain experience and market knowledge to his role as Noon’s Chief Executive Officer. We are confident that along with the team at Noon, Faraz will deliver an e-commerce platform like no other in the region.”

With an MBA from The Wharton School, Faraz Khalid has accumulated experience in building e-commerce platforms and in creating distinctive and long-term value for stakeholders. Faraz played an instrumental role in the success of Namshi, which was launched in 2012, and built the region’s largest fashion catalog with over 700 international brands.  

He said: “Noon presents the opportunity to create a dynamic e-commerce platform for, by and in the region. With our local market knowledge and presence, and our focus on product authenticity, supplier value creation, superior logistics, professional service and competitive pricing, we aim to bring a transformational e-commerce experience to the Middle East. I am honoured to take up the responsibility and to work with a dedicated team of professionals who share a common passion for creating a truly industry-defining online platform.”

Noon is a US$1 billion joint venture between Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and a group of prominent Gulf investors. With the largest assortment of original products at launch, customers can choose from across fashion, beauty, fitness, sports, technology, games and many more. With its state-of-the-art fulfilment centre, dedicated payment gateways and logistics, the e-commerce platform will also offer innovative experiences that surprise and delight special groups such as book lovers, adventurers and new parents. Every product segment has been carefully curated to fulfil the needs and aspirations of the region’s customers, especially its tech-savvy young population.

The spread and influence of technology will be a key driver of change across the globe over the next five years. However, there will be regional differences, and some countries will leapfrog traditional cycles of development.

In this report, we discuss these regional factors and consider how technology changes will affect consumers, retailers and consumer-facing brands.

We’ve identified 14 technology shifts that will be in play over the next five years. The top four rankings globally include:

The spread of existing technology and infrastructure

Machine learning and decision making

Big data and artificial intelligence

Cashless payment technology

We also ranked the likelihood of future scenarios and outcomes that the convergence of technologies could bring to consumers, retailers and suppliers. The top ranked outcomes globally were:

Consumers: technology for convenience; and consumers willing to accept suggestions from devices will likely see a rise in programmatic consumption - tied in first place in the consumer field.

Retailers: Instant payment - as baskets are captured and paid for as consumers walk out of the store.

Consumer-facing brands: Using technology for brand building and public relations purposes.

Technology adoption and impact will not be homogenous, and there are a number of regional differences that are explained by our experts in terms of consumer, economic, political and other considerations. These factors provide insights to which technologies in which markets may be important to focus on during the next five years.

MIDDLE EAST

In the Middle East, investment in technology innovation is in pockets, and is focused on global leadership rather than just regional consumers. However, consumers are also adopting a more modern, convenient lifestyle; technology is a key enabler as well as having a role to play in societal change.

“The technology solutions that enable brands and retailers to meet both shopper needs as well as deliver operational benefits will be the game changers,” noted Sue Temple, Head of Shopper Practice, Nielsen Growth and Emerging Markets.

Cities utilizing technologies such as internet of things (IOT) can generate data to find optimal solutions for pollution control or address traffic congestions. For households, these technologies will enable myriad of benefits, from cost control achieved through home system efficiencies (such as automatic switching on and off of cooling systems), to general home management with staple foods re-stock systems, etc.

SUB SAHARAN AFRICA

Despite having to build up from a traditional low base of infrastructure, technology and consumer spending, Sub Saharan Africa is expected to showcase significant acceleration and offer enormous opportunities for organisations across all consumer industries in the future.

According to Ailsa Wingfield, Thought Leadership, Nielsen Emerging Markets, “In the consumer packaged goods sector, suppliers will be the first adopters of game-changing tech, followed by retailers, followed by consumers.”

Africans are keen for cashless payment technology to alleviate traditional challenges with currency fluctuation, fraud, and limits to business and personal needs. However, the extent of mainstream adoption will be limited until infrastructure and consumer spending power improves.

Source:Nielsen

We launched the Facebook Journalism Project in January. Today we want to share an update about what we've heard from our partners and a recap of our work together over the past six months. 

Our work is focused around the three pillars of the Facebook Journalism Project:

• Collaborative development of news products

• Training and tools for journalists

• Training and tools for an informed community

1) Collaborative development of news products

Since launching the Facebook Journalism Project, we've met with 2,600 publishers around the globe to create a dialogue around how they use our products and how we could make improvements to better support publishers' needs. We're also making efforts to better explain how our products, like News Feed and Instant Articles, work so that publishers understand how to get more value from them. 

Instant Articles Improvements

We introduced a number of updates for Instant Articles based on ongoing conversations and helpful feedback from partners including:

• Call to Action buttons for email sign-ups and Page Likes to encourage reader loyalty and new testing for a Free Trial and Mobile App Install CTA. Year to date, we've seen over 2 million email sign ups resulting from Call to Action units in Instant Articles, with a current rate of over 25k per day across all publishers on Instant Articles.

• The ability to support simultaneous publishing on Google AMP and soon Apple News through the Instant Articles SDK.

• Improved ads monetization opportunities with more flexible ad density.

• New ads in the Related Articles section of stories.

Instant Articles now pays out more than $1 million per day to publishers via Facebook Audience Network, and in the last 6 months, RPMs from Facebook Audience Network in Instant Articles have increased by over 50%. We're excited by this momentum and will continue to invest in Instant Articles: over 10,000 publishers around the world use Instant Articles, growing over 25% in the last six months alone. More than a third of all clicks to articles on Facebook are now to Instant Articles.

Subscriptions in Instant Articles 

We are beginning to build a tool to support subscriptions within Instant Articles and plan to start testing with a small group of partners later this year. Our partners consistently identified support for subscription business models as a top priority, and we made it a priority for our teams as well. Subscriptions are not a one-size-fits-all model, and we have been working closely with several partners around the world to determine what a potential solution might look like. 

Like any new product, we'll have to refine it over time to make sure the product works for both people and publishers on Facebook. We’ll continue to listen and welcome feedback from our partners over the coming months.

Ads in Videos 

We announced that all eligible publishers can now make money from in-stream video ads on their own websites and apps through Audience Network. We began testing Ad Breaks in on-demand videos on Facebook in the U.S., expanding to nine countries over the course of the half. We hope to expand the test to additional partners as we learn and improve. We also began testing Ad Breaks in livestreams broadcast through the Live API with partners and third-party encoders. 

Rights Manager

We made improvements to Rights Manager, a tool that can help publishers manage and protect their videos on Facebook. Rights Manager is now easier to use and allows publishers to set automated rules to act on matches. 

Branded Content

We made three updates for publishers and creators who post and share branded content, based on feedback we received: we enabled more Pages to share branded content on Facebook, simplified our policy and enforcement guidelines, and updated the branded content tag to include the word ‘Paid’ in the post. In response to additional partner feedback, we are also running tests with a small number of publishers focused on branded content that is not editorially influenced by sponsors. As part of this test, we're exploring alternatives to the current 'with' tag and 'Paid' label.

Local News

Our work on local news is still nascent, but we know that local news is the starting place for great journalism. We've met with dozens of local newsrooms across the world to understand how we can best help and, in the U.S., we have begun testing new ways to help people discover local news on Facebook. 

A Closer Look at How We Work Together

One of the biggest changes we've made through the Facebook Journalism Project is how we work together with our news partners. Deep collaboration with publishers is a critical tenant of our product development process, and we've learned that we need a tailored approach. Here are a few of the ways we're actively engaging with publishers to provide more transparency and better align with our product development cycles:

• Executive Roundtables: We are regularly convening a group of leaders from a diverse set of news organizations in both the U.S. and Europe to provide guidance and share feedback.

• New Product Development: We are bringing Facebook and publisher engineers together in two ways: working groups and 1:1 meetings.

• Product Iteration: We are organizing publisher workshops to identify and act on opportunities to improve current products, like Instant Articles. 

• Hackathons: In the first half of 2017 we hosted four Facebook Journalism Project Hackathons in the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany where hundreds of people from news organizations gathered with Facebook engineers to prototype and create solutions important to the news industry. This remains a great source of creativity and collaboration.

 2) Tools and Training for Journalists 

In the last six months, we hosted 15 News Days — all-day product training, feedback sessions, partners showcases and 1:1 help desks for local journalists and audience, business, and newsroom leads — in Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, Chicago, Seattle, San Diego, Delhi, Hyderabad, Manchester, Milan, Edinburgh, Manila, Jakarta, Mexico City and Buenos Aires. We're planning to host another 15 in the next six months. 

Our team participated in 71 media industry events — leading keynotes and workshops or joining panels at 50 of them, sponsoring 36, and providing help desk support at approximately 15.

In addition, we established several training programs and launched new tools to help journalists on Facebook.

We announced a pilot project that delivers Facebook training and support to local and non-profit news organizations in the U.S. through a partnership with the Knight Foundation, The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, Detroit Journalism Cooperative, and Montclair State University’s Center for Cooperative Media.

Data and Insights

CrowdTangle

Since acquiring CrowdTangle, we made it free for publishers and journalism schools to help give partners the data and insights they need. In the first half of this year, CrowdTangle onboarded over 1,600 new partners around. Moreover, overall usage of the tool tripled, the platform is growing quickly in emerging markets like India and Brazil and is now being used in over 1,000 local newsrooms. 

In addition to increasing the overall adoption across the news and publishing industry, CrowdTangle launched several major product updates to the tool including:

• CrowdTangle Intelligence designed to give publishers a quick way to look at long-term trends across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit.

• A partnership with Reddit to give publishers an easy way to monitor important stories breaking on Reddit, as well as track communities and discussions relevant to their work.

• Finally, we heard that publishers wanted more insight into how their videos were performing, especially in relation to others in the industry, so CrowdTangleadded Facebook and Instagram video view metrics.

Cross-platform Insights

We are building and testing new insights that enable publishers to see audience consumption trends that cut across Facebook and their owned and operated properties.

New Training Programs and Tools

Facebook for Journalists Certificate 

We expanded our series of e-learning courses on Facebook products, tools, and services for journalists to 10 languages and launched the Facebook for Journalists Certificate, a three-course curriculum designed by the Poynter Institute and Facebook. 

Facebook Safety for Journalists 

In June we announced Facebook Safety for Journalists and introduced a dedicated page on our Facebook for Journalists website to provide resources designed specifically to help journalists protect their accounts and themselves on Facebook.

Partnered with First Draft Network

We increased our commitment to the non-profit First Draft Network and helped them establish a virtual verification community, among other initiatives. 

 3) Tools and Training for an informed community

 We introduced product enhancements and launched partnerships with journalists, educators and researchers to help support informed communities.

Addressing the Integrity of Information on Facebook

We know people want to see accurate information and high quality news on Facebook – and so do we. A few of our efforts to fight the spread of false news on our platform and support an informed community include:

• Disrupting economic incentives because most false news is financially motivated.

• Reducing the posts and ads in News Feed that link to low-quality web page experiences.

• Introducing ranking updates to identify and lower the distribution of false news, clickbait and sensationalism, and to help reduce low quality links in News Feed so people see more informative stories.

• Testing a new placement of Related Articles before you read a story in News Feed, to give people more ways to see a more complete picture of a story or topic.

• Testing ways to make it easier for people to report a false story on Facebook to help address false news globally.

• Exploring better positioning of publisher branding in News Feed as a focus in the months ahead.

Promoting News Literacy

We want to empower people to identify misleading news content when they encounter it — on any platform. 

Earlier this year, we gathered journalists, academics and non-profits for our first working group on news literacy at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, and held similar gatherings in Berlin and London shortly thereafter. We helped found and fund the News Integrity Initiative at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, a diverse new network of partners who will work together to fund research and projects focused on news literacy. And most recently, we held the first meeting of the Asia Pacific News Literacy Group in Hong Kong.

We're Making Progress and We Have More to Do

We're just getting started. We've learned so much since we launched the Facebook Journalism Project and this collaboration is already driving innovation that we couldn't have achieved on our own. It’s going to take a concerted effort on all of our parts to help build a future where quality journalism can thrive.

Written by Campbell Brown, Head of News Partnerships, and Fidji Simo, VP of Product

Global integrated communications agency, Grayling, has been selected as the public relations partner for Virgin Mobile Middle East and Africa – a leading mobile telecoms service provider in the region.

With over 30 years of experience in META, Grayling will be responsible for developing and executing a strategic public relations plan for Virgin Mobile Middle East and Africa, and is set to play an important role in strengthening Virgin Mobile’s PR footprint as the company looks to launch the brand in new markets across the region in the next few years.

“Virgin Mobile Middle East and Africa is a truly dynamic company with a unique vision for the future of mobile. We are honored to be working with such an exciting global entity and we look forward to building their brand even further as they continue to grow and gain momentum across the markets,” commented Jonathan Shillington, Managing Director, Grayling.

Virgin Mobile Middle East and Africa has been in the region since 2007, and operates the two consumer brands of Virgin Mobile and FRiENDi Mobile. The mobile provider has established a market leading position across the region, being the only MVNO in the region that is currently serving millions of customers across five operating markets, including Saudi Arabia, Oman and South Africa.

“Following an extensive pitch process, we are excited to embark on this new partnership with Grayling. The Middle East and Africa region is entering an exciting phase in its evolution, and we are confident that the agency will support us in our communications efforts to continue driving the success of the brand to new heights,” commented Rob Beswick, Vice President of Brand at Virgin Mobile Middle East and Africa.

Purch’s Business.com has launched the Business.com Report Card, powered by BizEquity, a small business valuation service that gives small-to-medium businesses realistic estimates of their value and comparisons with regional and national industry averages to help SMB owners better understand and grow their businesses.

Built on Purch’s already robust community of 5.7 million SMB members, Business.com relaunched in April as a content and commerce marketplace that connects industry-specific communities of small business owners with the experts who can help them grow their businesses. The Business.com Report Card, developed in part with online business valuation leader BizEquity, is the latest tool in the company’s growing SMB portfolio that gives small business owners access to vital business development services that were previously unavailable to them.

“Business.com continues to revolutionize the small business publishing model,” said Greg Mason, CEO of Purch. “This new SMB valuation tool fills a gap in the market by creating a ‘Zillow-like’ service for small businesses that helps SMB owners better understand their business’ value and gain clearer insight into their competitive standing.”

In addition to giving SMBs big-business insights through the key valuation metrics of asset, equity, enterprise, and liquidation, in the coming months, Business.com will allow SMBs to: Buy, sell or advertise their business; Manage local listings; Monitor reviews, social sites, and keyword/SEO performance; And compare business services ranking in relevant industries to what competitors are using.

The Business.com Report Card will be available for use across all the industries served by Business.com, including restaurants/hospitality, construction/general contracting, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, real estate, agriculture, travel, and financial services.

UAE users spent 255 million minutes on the UAE’s leading platform searching for both luxury and affordable items

●        The platform recorded approximately 17 million visits during Ramadan –  a 16% increase compared to the previous three months

●        Visitor traffic during Ramadan peaked at 1pm, compared to 11am throughout the rest of the year

●        More than 555,000 messages were exchanged through the Instant chat feature on the dubizzle app - an increase of 15.6% from the previous month

dubizzle, the leading classifieds platform in the UAE, reveals user trends, preferences and activities during the month of Ramadan. The platform recorded approximately 17 million visits from May 26 to June 24 –  a 16% increase compared to the previous three months.

The report highlights that users utilized the platform to look for both luxury and affordable items, spending an average of 15 minutes per visit – a similar amount of time browsing dubizzle compared to other months. UAE users spent a total of 255 million minutes on dubizzle during the holy month, which is equivalent to the time it takes to travel to and from Pluto 25 times.

Results show that visitor traffic during Ramadan peaked at 1pm, compared to 11am throughout the rest of the year. The lowest activity was recorded around 8pm (iftar time), then rose again during the evening hours until 2am, where activity fell until 10am. Naturally, visits to the platform during Eid (June 25) decreased by 22% compared to the average, highlighting Eid as a special occasion in which distractions are avoided and time is spent with loved ones.

Commenting on these trends, Nadia Zehni, Director of Marketing at dubizzle, said: "Ramadan is one of the most important periods of the year for Muslims, and it significantly impacts user behavior across all sectors in the UAE. The changes in lifestyle and internet consumption patterns during the fasting hours require companies to be adaptable and adjust their activities in line with trends. To make our product more relevant for users during Ramadan, we included an imsakiyah – otherwise known as the Ramadan calendar – on our mobile apps for the second year in a row, following last year’s success and positive feedback from users.”

During Ramadan, more than 555,000 messages were exchanged through the Instant chat feature on the dubizzle app, an increase of 15.6% from the previous month. The peak period for using the chat feature was at 10pm on Saturdays throughout the holy month.

Currently, 73% of all traffic on dubizzle comes from mobile devices, making it the most popular channel for the platform. The dubizzle app ranks as the #1 lifestyle app in the Google Play Store and in the top 3 shopping app in the Apple App Store in the UAE.

When looking into the most searched brands on dubizzle Motors this Ramadan, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche and Toyota were highlighted as the top three, showcasing a demand for luxury, fast and entry-level cars. Similarly, the most searched brands under the Items for Sale section of the platform were Bose, Ikea and Rolex – a combination of necessities and leisure goods.

It allows anyone in its global network to ask questions and get answers from any of their 12,000+ colleagues around the world.

Built by J. Walter Thompson Worldwide, Mirum, and Swiss AI specialist Starmind, Pangaea puts together neuroscience and AI development in a self-learning network that helps employees unlock the vast knowledge that exists within the network. 

Employees can ask any question on the platform anonymously – whether it’s about a campaign, a client, a sales lead, or even the best place to host a business lunch. As employees respond, Pangaea logs and rates the quality of the answers. Learning who is best equipped to tackle certain questions and what existing answers offer the best solution, Pangaea provides faster and more accurate solutions for similar questions that may be posed in the future.

“ Pangaea is our way of bringing the world back together – removing the barriers of time and language – so that our global community is connected across cultures and disciplines, becoming more accessible to each other – and more collaborative – than ever before. ”

“Pangaea is named after the supercontinent that once existed before the continents broke apart and became what we know them to be today,” said Tamara Ingram, Worldwide Chief Executive Officer of J. Walter Thompson Company. “Pangaea is our way of bringing the world back together – removing the barriers of time and language – so that our global community is connected across cultures and disciplines, becoming more accessible to each other – and more collaborative – than ever before.”

Pangaea resolves an inevitable organizational challenge that many large networks face: knowing whom to turn to when you have a question that your typical channels cannot answer. 

The AI connects users to the people they need to know to answer their questions rather than replacing human connection with tech.

“Our partnership with Starmind has been critical in developing what is our most ambitious effort to apply AI in a way that improves the way we work together as a network,” said Jamie McLellan, J. Walter Thompson Company’s Chief Technology Officer. “With Starmind’s AI building block as the cognitive engine for Pangaea, we’ve created something that allows our staff to contribute to projects beyond their typical day-to-day. It makes us better positioned to create extraordinary work for our clients. This is no gimmick.” 

The concept for Pangaea was born in 2015 and beta tested within the whole network in early 2016. It was launched internally last October. The platform is currently available to everyone in the J. Walter Thompson network via desktop or mobile device and is available in multiple languages.

Erik DuPlessis sent me a link to this post titled 'The Wisdom of Taxi Drivers'  by Damon Stapleton. Thank you, Erik, like you said, “very, very good”. Why? Because it reminds us that the power of stories lies in being interesting, specific and human. It reminds us that we need to keep people – the target audience if you must – at the heart of the creative development process.

Stapleton tells the story of a New York taxi driver who sums up the difference between New York and Los Angeles as,

“New York is theatre. LA is TV. Yes, sir.”

Succinct, readily appreciated and based in truth, the description is still memorable to Stapleton 20 years later (and I would argue still just as applicable). So if a taxi driver can come up with something this good, why are brands struggling to create advertising that resonates with their audience?

There has been a lot of news about ads created for major brands that have met with serious consumer backlash because the idea or presentation was out of synch with the audience’s mindset. As noted in this AdAge article many marketers seem to have forgotten that people’s BS detector is dialed up and on 24/7 these days and so end up broadcasting ads that are explicitly rejected, not just ignored.

Stapleton asks us to fast forward five years and asks what the future will be like. He suggests,

“We make content cheaper; we make more of it and we put it everywhere. This very process will make what is made more generic and boring.”

To which I would add, inauthentic, inappropriate and irrelevant. Stapleton proposes that the solution will be what it always has been,

“Be distinctive. Be interesting. Be noticed. Have something to say. And say it well. Those things don’t change.”

In the past I might have agreed, but when everyone can create content, good and bad, how will we make sure that content will be seen? Even the content that is remarkable, inspirational or useful will be lost in a sea of consumer-driven creativity. Sure search and algorithms might help make stuff be more discoverable but will people actually bother to seek it out? 

Written by Nigel Hollis, Executive Vice President and Chief Global Analyst, Kantar Millward Brown

WPP announces that its wholly-owned operating company Grey, the global marketing communications agency, has acquired a majority stake in Extrême-Sensio (“Sensio”) in France.

Sensio is a full service digital agency that offers services including consulting, design, technology and customer acquisition. Founded in 1998, the agency has around 75 people and is headquartered in Paris. Clients include Groupe PSA, AXA, E.Leclerc, Futuroscope, Häagen Dazs and Nexity. Sensio’s revenues were approximately €7.7 million for the year ended 31 December 2016 with gross assets of approximately €5.7 million as at the same date. The company is listed as one of the “Growth Champions” by Les Echos / Statista, and features in the Financial Times’ “1000 Fastest Growing Companies”.

As a result of UK’s referendum decision to leave the European Union, WPP is placing an even greater emphasis on growth in Western Continental Europe, which includes Germany, France, Italy and Spain. This acquisition continues WPP’s strategy of investing in fast growth markets and important sectors. In France, WPP companies (including associates) generate revenues of US$700 million and employ around 4,500 people. WPP's digital revenues were over US$7.5 billion in 2016, representing 39% of the Group's total revenues of US$19.4 billion. WPP has set a target of 40-45% of revenue to be derived from digital in the next four to five years.

Digital Shadows, the industry leader in digital risk management,reveals the findings of an in-depth study carried out by its team of multilingual analysts assessing the changing habits and tactics of organized credit card fraud gangs. It points to increased sophistication of a professional ecosystem as fraudsters seek to up-skill themselves and novice would-be cyber criminals.

By analyzing hundreds of criminal forums, Digital Shadows discovered a new trend in the form of remote learning ‘schools’. Available to Russian speakers only, these six-week courses comprise 20 lectures with five expert instructors. The course includes webinars, detailed notes and course material. In exchange for RUB 45,000 ($745) (plus $200 for course fees), aspiring cyber criminals have the potential to make $12k a month, based on a standard 40-hour working week. Given the average Russian monthly wage is less than $700 a month  it means cybercriminals could make nearly 17x more than a ‘legitimate’ job.

Interestingly, a criminal ‘code’ appears to exist on many of the Russian-origin carding forums, whereby no Russian card details are permitted for sale.

The criminals are going after a potentially lucrative market. In just two of the most popular ‘carding’ forums nearly 1.2 million card holder details are on sale for an average of $6 each. However, prices do vary dependent on the level of security associated with the card and cardholder. The least expensive cards are those requiring further authentication to ‘cash out’. The main obstacle to this is the PIN of the cardholder, which can be tricky and time-consuming to find out. Therefore, there exist automated serviceswhich call cardholders in the Middle Eastin an attempt to scam their details using social engineering techniques.

Social engineering is given a heavy emphasis in the courses. Advice is given on how to manipulate people through knowledge of their local area in order to build rapport with the target and trick them into exposing information (such as PIN numbers), usually over the phone. As the instructor puts it “that’s why I always advise to watch the news because with such incidents, it is possible to play beautifully.”

“The card companies have developed sophisticated anti-fraud measures and high quality training like this can be seen as a reaction to this”, said Rick Holland, VP Strategy at Digital Shadows. “Unfortunately, it’s a sign that criminals continually seek to lower barriers to entry, which then put more criminals into the ecosystem and cost card brands, retailers and consumers. However, the benefit is that the criminals are increasingly exposing their methods, which means that credit card companies, merchants and customers can learn from them and adjust their defenses accordingly.”

The research found that credit card criminals fall into four main groups (with some overlapping between each)

• Payment Card Data Harvesters - do the ‘dirty work’ in terms of harvesting the payment card information. This is done through intercepting card holder’s information whether this be through point of sale malware, skimming devices, phishing, breached databases, or through operating botnets

• Distributors – are the ‘middle men’ who typically make the most money. While the criminals who harvest may use the card data themselves, they also sell it on to others who will package, repackage and sell on the card information

• Fraudsters - run the most risk in terms of getting caught by law enforcement or being conned by fellow criminals. Once fraudsters have acquired payment card information from their distributor, the fraud can happen. These individuals tend to be less technical and attract a lower calibre of cybercriminal, often relying on online guides and courses to learn the latest techniques

• Monetization - There are many different roles within the stage, including those who have been duped into operating drop addresses and those involved in the reselling of fraudulently acquired goods.

Rick Holland, VP Strategy at Digital Shadows continues: “This ecosystem is highly complex and international. At each stage, it creates victims – from the card industry that loses $24 billion a year to consumers who are frequently duped into revealing their card details. One of the key themes that stood out for us is the level of ‘social engineering’ criminals are now using. Aggressive and manipulative phone calls to victims to reveal PIN numbers is just one example of this.”

Digital Shadows offers the following five tips for consumers:

1. Don’t be part of a cashing out scam. Be wary of job postings offering well-paid jobs to re-ship goods, often offering to work from home. Fraudsters go to great lengths to make these companies look legitimate.

2. Protect your PIN. Never share your PIN over email of phone, no matter who says they are calling.

3. Be picky about who you shop with. If shopping somewhere new, ensure the shop uses 3D Secure.

4. Take care when booking travel and hotels. Offers that appear too good to be true often are. Act with caution if using a travel agent you have not previously used; this is a common scam for fraudsters.

5. Check your statements carefully. Check your bank statements carefully for irregular purchases - even those that appear in a nearby location and for small amounts. Alert the bank if you suspect fraudulent activity.

Digital Shadows offers the following five tips for merchants:

1. Learn about latest techniques. Criminals will do what they can to avoid friction. If certain banks have better anti-fraud measures, the instructors recommend avoiding them. Understand what makes carding difficult. 3D secure, for example is an additional layer of security deployed by Visa and Mastercard, is proven to be a real obstacle for criminals. 

2. Make security as important as user experience. There must always be a balance between security and user experience, but online merchants should be aware that criminals are turning to mobile apps to commit payment card fraud as it provides them with less obstacles. 

3. Monitor for mentions of cardable sites. Criminals share lists of cardable sites; if your company name crops up, it’s a good indication that you are experiencing fraud. Companies can search with the help of Google Alerts or open source web crawlers like Scrapy to look for mentions of their brands.  

4. Train your staff and your customers. Remember that the most advanced methods all involved social engineering.

5. Don’t be part of the problem. Cashing out is only one small part of the fraud; the harvesting of credit card information is required first. Protect your customers’ credit card information by storing the information securely and ensuring payment software is patched. 

Digital Shadows offers the following five tips for card providers:

1. Detect phishing with DNS Twist. Proactively monitor for permutations on your domain name, which could help you to detect any criminal seeking to harvest information from your customers.

2. Understand threats against your customers. Monitor the activity of banking trojans, such as Trickbot, to identify patterns in their targeting and techniques used to gain access to your customers’ computers.

3. Monitor for AVC shops for BINs and IINs. Monitor for Bank Identification Numbers (BINs) and Issuer Identification Numbers (IINs) that are offered for sale. In many cases, it is possible to free text search and filter by BIN numbers. 

4. Monitor IRC checking channels. Monitor IRC checking channels for BINs and IINs that are indicative of a criminal testing an individuals’ card.

5. Benchmark yourself against peers. Understand which card providers fraudsters recommend not using, and use this to understand where your company stacks up.