Surreal Entrepreneur

As an entrepreneur this is the most feared headline concerning business. There are certainly some truths to “any press is good press” however, when it comes to the topic of fraud, no press is the best press. While I was working on my first company with a good friend of mine, I was troubled by how much time and money we were spending on security. Now granted, this was a website that did business transactions over the internet, so I understood the necessity for some security. As I dug further down the rabbit hole I realized that it is imperative to not only protect physical assets from theft, but also information about the business, employees and most importantly, customers.

One Saturday morning I was startled awake by a phone call from a toll free number. Now I have made it a habit to entertain myself by playing harmless games with phone sales people, however, receiving a call at 8:15 am on a Saturday morning is preposterous and I meant to chew someone out. Answering the phone in a very perturbed voice I was met with a very to-the-point professional who informed me that he was a member of the State Employees Credit Union staff and that he had seen some suspicious activity on my account and wanted to verify that I had made the transaction. So after I had put him through his paces to test that he was who he said he was, he did the same to me. He then told me that there had been a charge to $4000+ dollars to be payed to a company that I had never heard of. He had also seen this same charge on several other member’s cards and so he was suspecting that it was a fraudulent charge. At any rate, we tracked back through my bill and highlighted any possible matches to previous charges and found out that one company that I had bought a t-shirt for a favorite musical band had been hacked and that hundreds of people had been charged over $4000 each by the person that got this websites customer information.

Needless to say, I haven’t shopped at that site again and I would certainly not recommend it to any of my friends. There are so many ways people are finding to take money from other people. It’s incredible how much a business owner has to prepare for. However, in this situation, it’s safe to abide by Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong, will (sorry if I’m paraphrasing that). We as business owners must not only work to discover what trends are happening that threaten our livelihoods, but we must prepare for it and be proactive to defend against these threats.

A gas station that is part of a chain gets robbed and no one gets hurt, who does this affect? The cashier might be shaken up a little bit. The owner has insurance, so the money is replaced, the police get some excitement, and someone has $300 more in their pocket.

Now what if a small business gets robbed, the owner is most likely the cashier. He or she might fight harder to protect their money, someone could get hurt, the money is not insured and a whole week or two will go into the books with out profit. Two weeks of profit could be the difference between being able to purchase inventory or spiraling down into failure. It is a simple metaphor to illustrate the necessity for being proactive about security and taking measures to put up walls between your money, your customers money, and the bad guys.