CROSEC, the Commercial Retail Online Security & Economic Crime Association, exists because every retailer is solving the same fraud problem separately, and none of them can tell whether they are winning.

Why we exist

A fraudster identified and blocked by one retailer simply moves to the next one, running the same playbook against a business that has no way of knowing they have already been caught. The same problem gets solved over and over, badly, and the results are never shared. Fraud does not exploit weak controls so much as the distance between the people running them.

CROSEC was founded by Leslie Falvey and Tyson Hackwood out of their work authoring the GSMA's consumer scam research. That work sized the problem from the consumer side and mapped the responses being mounted across the wider ecosystem. One participant was conspicuously missing from the coordinated response: the retailer.

The problem nobody owns

A significant and growing share of retail loss now occurs after a completely legitimate payment. Returns abuse, first-party fraud, loyalty gaming, promotion abuse and fraudulent delivery claims all begin with a transaction that every control in the payments stack correctly approved. Nothing in the payments stack addresses this, because it is not a payments problem.

It is a coordination problem. Which means it needs an association, not another product.

How we operate

  • Retailer membership is free, permanently. Not a launch promotion. Nothing is asked of members today, and when benchmarking is built, contributing to it will be optional and the results will come back to contributors at no cost.
  • Retailers set the agenda. Priorities come from the membership. Nobody outside it decides what CROSEC works on or what it publishes.
  • Data sharing will be aggregate and anonymised. When benchmarking launches it will operate at category level, with a minimum of three contributing retailers per category, weighted by transaction volume. No individual retailer's figures will be published or attributed.
  • Competition law is a hard boundary. Meetings exclude pricing, margins, supplier contract rates, marketing strategy and market allocation, and run under Chatham House rules.

Where we are going

Commerce crime does not respect borders, and neither does the playbook. We are launching market by market, starting where the founders have the deepest operating history, and extending coordination outward from there on the cross-border research relationships already in place.

Founders

Leslie Falvey, Founder and Chairman. Strategy consulting background at BCG and Monitor, followed by senior operating roles across telecommunications, technology and retail, including General Manager for LEGO in Singapore and Malaysia and Head of Asia for a regional telco group. Sits on the board of Ooredoo Hutchison Asia. Co-author of the GSMA consumer scam research.

Tyson Hackwood, Co-Founder and President. Payments specialist. First employee of Braintree in Southeast Asia, previously at PayPal, and more recently rebuilt point-of-sale and payments infrastructure for a major department store group. Co-author of the GSMA consumer scam research.