The Fraud Fighter: How One Irish Entrepreneur Is Taking On E-Commerce's Fastest-Growing Problem
John Murphy built a fraud detection system to protect his own Shopify store. Now he's turning it into a business — and the timing couldn't be more urgent.
In early March, a merchant selling high-end equestrian equipment got a $4,000 order through her Shopify store. Nothing looked obviously wrong. She shipped the product. Within days, the bank had reversed the charge. The buyer had used stolen card details, a Tor browser, and a burner phone number. She was out the money and the goods.
Shopify had flagged the order as medium risk. No further context. No explanation of what that meant or what to do about it.
John Murphy, an Irish entrepreneur based in Italy, heard about the case through his work as a coach in a high-ticket dropshipping community. He ran the transaction through a system he'd built for his own business. The red flags were immediate. "There was no chance she was getting that money back," he says. "It was clear fraud."
That conversation, and dozens like it, convinced him to turn his internal tool into a product. This week, he is launching FRIQ Labs — a managed fraud review service for Shopify merchants.
His previous business, E Bike Generation, sold electric bikes to the US market and scaled to mid-seven figures. As orders grew, so did the cost of using third-party fraud protection agencies, which charged a percentage of every sale. "I was spending between three and four thousand dollars a month on fraud protection fees," Murphy says. "It was one of my largest expenses."
He started reverse-engineering how those agencies worked — tracing where the raw data came from and how it was turned into a risk signal. Eventually, he built his own internal system. His team used it on every order. It worked so well that even after he sold the business in December 2023, the new owners kept using it.
The pivot to a standalone product came through his coaching work. Murphy is a resident coach in a high-ticket dropshipping community. Members kept coming to him with chargebacks — and with the same question. Was it real fraud, or so-called "friendly fraud," where a customer disputes a legitimate charge?
“A lot of fraud is just eaten by the merchant. Then they go looking for protection after they've already been burnt," he explains.
It's a familiar pattern. A fraudulent order gets through. The merchant absorbs the loss. Then they discover they may have been on a shared list of easy targets all along — and more fraudulent orders may already be in the pipeline.
FRIQ Labs connects to any Shopify store via webhook. When an order comes in, transaction details are pulled securely into the platform. A human analyst reviews it and produces a written report — not just a traffic light rating, but a detailed explanation of what signals were present and why. "We don't just give them a low, medium, or high. We tell them why. We empower them to make more informed decisions," Murphy explains.
The human element is deliberate. Murphy believes AI-only systems miss context and create false confidence. For now, every review is done by a person. The team spans English, Italian, and Spanish, which he expects will cover the majority of his early client base — predominantly US, UK, and Australian merchants.
Longer term, Murphy has an idea he describes as still in ideation phase: an automated system that flags confirmed fraud cases to local authorities, something that currently doesn't exist in any standardised form for e-commerce merchants."
Murphy knows the problem will only grow. Online sales keep rising. The dark web market for stolen card details keeps expanding. AI is making fraud attempts more sophisticated. FRIQ Labs, in his view, is aimed squarely at the gap between the merchants who need protection and the enterprise-grade tools that are either too expensive or too opaque to be useful.
