The leader in collaborative fraud management, Ethoca, today announced that an Internet leader in brand name goods at clearance prices, Shoplift.com, is joining with other merchant members of Ethoca's global network to work together in the fight against e-commerce fraud.

Shoplift.com, which sells brand-name merchandise at 30-90 percent off, offers consumers everything from air hockey and arcade games to watches and web cams. The company selected Ethoca's collaborative fraud management solution to help it reduce fraudulent transactions and reduce the expenses of manually processing transactions in the ongoing fight against fraud. 321play.com, an affiliated company,will also be using Ethoca's collaborative fraud management service.

Online retail sales are expected to continue growing in 2008. Sales should reach $204 billion, according to Forrester Group, a 17 percent growth over the previous year. Retailers face an increasing and related rise in e-commerce fraud, and in the operational cost of managing it, with the rise in sales. A recent study by CyberSource estimated online fraud totaled $3.6 billion in the U.S. in 2007, up from $3.1 billion in 2006.

Victor Mezh, owner of Shoplift.com says: "Ethoca's collaborative fraud management service will enable Shoplift.com to employ the latest practices in combating online fraud by benefiting from the shared payment experiences of Ethoca's global member community. By lowering our fraud risk, and automating a higher percentage of the manual reviews we currently have to do, this approach enables Shoplift.com to focus on our core business - helping shoppers to get cut-rate prices on brand-name purchases".

Andre Edelbrock, Ethoca's President and CEO says: "We welcome Shoplift.com and 321play.com as the latest members of the Ethoca community". "The steady growth in online shopping is attracting more fraudsters, and making it harder for retailers to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent orders. Apart from the obvious cost of fraud losses, there is an increasingly large hidden cost as nearly one in three transactions are referred for manual review, plus lost revenue from mistakenly rejecting legitimate customers. Our network members get a much clearer and sophisticated picture of risk associated with a transaction from the experiences of other online merchants, enabling them to lower their fraud rates, confidently and safely accept more orders and send fewer for manual review."

Including business by Internet, fax, phone or mail, Ethoca is the pioneer in collaborative fraud management for businesses in Internet commerce and other 'customer-not-present' environments. Ethoca enables its clients to make more informed decisions about their customer transactions in a way that is efficient, effective and ethical, by connecting its members to a collective pool of member-provided payment experience information.