8 Tips to Protect Yourself from Credit Card Fraud
I’m pretty excited about my first blog entry. While I might be a Jedi Master of eCommerce, I’m just a Padawan Learner when it comes to blogging! I hope you all find the information, tips, and stories that follow to be mildly interesting at the least, but my hope is that it becomes a resource of Actionable Intelligence.
Credit card fraud is a real danger out there and you must have procedures in place to help protect yourself from it. While there is no magic solution to this, there are many things you can do to avoid having this happen to you.
Here are some of our tips:
1) Rely on your wits. Nothing combats basic fraud better than your gut. If something looks like a fish and smells like a fish, it probably is a fish. So keep a look out for the following:
- Unusually large orders
- Orders that originate in “high risk” foreign countries (Malaysia, Turkey, Russia & Nigeria are some examples)
- Orders where the Bill To and Ship To addresses are different
2) If your eCommerce software tracks abandoned carts and unprocessed orders, see if an order was tried several times before becoming a successful order. This could indicate someone who is trying various cards until they get one that works!
3) Nothing beats the phone. Make it a customer service policy to call and thank each customer (particularly if they are a first time customer). Sometimes the name on the order and the person on the other end of your phone call are complete strangers!
4) If your gateway allows for the enabling of fraud controls, try using them. Typically you want to not only make sure you have an address match (AVS), but a CVV2 match as well. That at least helps ensure that the card is present and physically in the hands of the potential customer. Keep in mind, it still could be stolen.
5) Use online tools like the White Pages to verify the phone number, name and address of the person on the order. Sometimes you will find that the phone number and the address do not match! This can happen if someone has the card information and knows where the person lives. They then use their own phone number, hoping you will call them and they can verbally verify the order, even though it’s not their card! This is a great, simple tool to help prevent you from shipping product you may end up with a charge back on.
6) Don’t ship to P.O. Boxes.
7) Consider a policy of not accepting orders from free or web-based email addresses. Emails should be tracked back to a true ISP. To check, just add www in front of the second part of the email address and see what comes up. If it looks like a real business that provides Internet access, the email can be tracked back to a real person.
8) Educate Yourself. Here are some great links to organizations that help prevent fraud as well as agencies that prosecute it.
- FTC – http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/business.shtm
- Internet Crime Complaint Center – http://www.ic3.gov/default.aspx
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