During 2002 Andrew Goodwill, MD of Early Warning (UK) Ltd, established a small online computer store called ukcomputerparts.com. Despite the site`s limited length of operation and public exposure, Andrew became increasingly dismayed at the sheer number of credit card fraud attempts on the site, as well as the absence of any real system to help prevent them.
In September 2002 Andrew's response to the problem was to launch the original Early Warning Website. The idea was simple - Andrew put his known fraud data (only a few records at that time) into an online database and then made the system available to other companies trading online so they could check their own sales order data against it. Andrew also encouraged all of the users of the system to enter their own fraud data.
The Early Warning Fraud Database was born. The system was originally offered to retailers free-of-charge, with a yearly subscription fee being launched in February 2003. The database now called CardAware is growing daily and contains 10s of thousands of records.
The company now has an expanding client base who voluntarily enter details of any fraud or suspected fraud. As a result, over £5 million has been saved for Early Warning clients to-date.
