Credit card and debit card fraud could cost online merchants billions of dollars over the next five years unless they implement the technology to detect it, a new report says.

The report, released Friday by Meridien Research, warns that as more transactions are conducted over the Internet, online payment fraud will rise in tandem, increasing from $1.6 billion worldwide in 2000 to $15.5 billion in 2005. Although anti-fraud technology is not foolproof, the biggest factor in the projected increase is that only an estimated 30 percent of merchants use anti-fraud technology, Meridien analyst Jeanne Capachin said. Meridien, based in Newton, Mass., provides research on technologies tied to the financial services industry. Last month, a hacker broke into Egghead.com's customer database, potentially exposing more than 3 million credit cards. The company later said the intruder did not gain access to any of the credit card numbers it had on file, but the incident raised fears about the security of using credit cards online and the potential for fraud. Late last year, a number of credit card issuers, including American Express, MBNA and Discover, introduced "disposable" credit card numbers that can only be used once. And credit card issuers have been pushing smart cards, or cards that have a microchip embedded in them containing customers' personal information, for years. Some companies make software that combats online payment fraud. Their technology ranges from applications that recognize patterns of questionable transactions to systems that look for certain fraud-linked scenarios. One scenario could be a shopper buying something from a Web site for the first time that buys an expensive item and has it shipped to an address that is different from the billing address.