When Chad Evans took a job in 2016 as manager of online investigations for retailer PetSmart Inc., he thought he'd be ferreting out small-time credit card fraudsters. But sometimes he catches glimpses of what may be larger, darker crimes.Evans and his team spend their days in a squat Phoenix office building combing through online transactions to find suspicious patterns. He's basically an internet mall cop, tasked with nabbing virtual shoplifters. Not every company has an Evans. Many websites accept fraud as a cost of doing business. But online fraud has soared in recent years-a side effect of the introduction of chip cards, which have made it harder for crooks to create fake cards to use in stores. This has forced many merchants to rethink their approach. Along with rejecting suspicious purchases, they're tracing them to their sources and building cases against the perpetrators with police.
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