Business, E commerce.
Top 10 signs of online credit card fraud - as the longtime owner of a couple of popular online stores, i' ve learned the hard way - through experience - that online criminals are constantly trying to take advantage of the ease in online shipping to commit fraud. The bogus charges are almost always refunded. For consumers whose credit cards are used in online fraud, there' s no loss.
But for online retailers who get conned into processing the orders, there is no relief. - you' re out the order, the merchandise you shipped and the online fees charged by your credit card processor. If it' s fraud, you get a chargeback. Those chargebacks are never pleasant. But after plenty of grumbling, I decided to consider them what financial expert and radio talk show host Dave Ramsey calls a" stupid tax. " Then, I set my mind to learn from them so I wouldn' t keep paying the" stupid tax. " I started by making a list of every chargeback I was hit with over a 12 - month period. In the early days, I had my share.
I rigorously examined them, looking for patterns and similarities. - i still get stung, but very rarely these days. As a result, I instituted some security procedures and checklists that have worked well in greatly reducing the fraud losses from my stores. The one single step that has most helped reduce fraudulent orders for me and my stores is to eliminate shipping to any location other than North America. But while I no doubt do indeed do lose some legitimate business from overseas customers, it has been my experience that most fraud originates overseas. I know, that' s a drastic step.
And my experience is not unusual. - thus, not allowing orders from places other than the u. Once recent study I have seen, notes that fraud, from Cybersource rates on overseas orders are four times the level of North American orders. S. and Canada helps eliminate many of the problems. Most of them are from criminals trying to see if a credit card number they have is still good. Still, some thief still, almost every day tries to get through. They' ll place an order and provide a ship - to address in the U.
Below are my top 10 suggestions for catching the fraud before you complete the transaction. - as many of these flags as you have on an order, the more apt it is bogus: 1) shipping fedex overnight is a frequent marker. A dead give away and cause for you to seriously question the oder is when the overnight shipping costs approximate the item' s cost. 2) Look at the phone number and e - mail address provided by the customer. The thief figures the merchant will move so fast to process the order that there won' t be too much scrutiny. Does the area code match the city and state of the customer? Thieves always use these free accounts.
If the customer uses a free Yahoo! , Hotmail, does it correspond, or Google account to the customer' s name? - so, of course, do many genuine customers. Stores provides, examine how the, for example customer found you. But an e - mail to a domain not associated with free web - based accounts, with a username( the part before the" @" sign) that matches the customer, is usually good. 3) If your store has referrer info on orders, like Yahoo! My store' s order info lists the search phrase they used, or the last page they came from. And IP( Internet Protocol) address is a unique numerical identifier that much like a house address.
Thieves tend to search on phrases like" international shipping" or" overnight delivery" instead of the category or keywords products are advertised under. 4) Check the IP address. - in this case, it identifies the computer network that the order came from. Check it out. Your oder processing software should also show you the IP address that the order was sent from. On my Yahoo! If it' s overseas, shipping to the U.
Stores, all I have to do is click the address and it does a trace, identifying the network location. - s. , i consider it fraud unless i can call the phone number and talk to a real customer. 5) beware of mail forwarding operations and shipping to post office boxes. Many thieves order your items from overseas and have them shipped to maildrops. Watch out for mail processing locations. Often, instead of a box number, these locations can be spotted by having a" suite" number under the address line. Seattle and Los Angeles have them for Asia.
Miami and Houston have a bunch of maildrops serving South America. - new your city handles africa and eastern europe. Often you' ll see it listed to a service for mail forwarding company. 6) Be suspicious if the shipping address and the billing address on the order are different. If suspicious, run the customer address through Google. At the very least, don, whenever this happens' t process the order unless you call the customer to confirm the order. I get a lot of orders from parents buying my products for their kids who are away at college so that' s not a policy we impose. Some stores even make it a policy to ship only to the billing address listed for the credit card.
But we always call when the addresses are different. 7) Always expect fraud when you get multiple orders submitted from the same customer in sequence, using the same credit card, or the same ship - to address. 8) Beware of unusually large orders. - you know what is a big order. You know from your oder processing reports, what the average customer buys. Is it over$ 250? Over$ 1, 000? Over$ 500? When the norms are exceeded you should carefully examine the order. 9) Be skeptical when you get orders with multiple quantities of the same product.
Serious customers make mistakes in filling our your oder forms. - it is common for fraudulent orders to be large quantities of a single item. 10) look for typos, grammar and punctuation errors. But not nearly as often as thieves do. If the phone is disconnected, mark it as fraud. If I had to boil everything down to a single piece of advice, it would be this: When in doubt, try to reach the customer. If there is no answer, leave a message on the answering machine. If after 24 hours the e - mail and the call are not returned, do not process.
Then send an e - mail. - these are just some of the fraud indicators and precautions i' ve learned over the years. But I have instructed all my employees to filter our orders through skeptical eyes. They are by no means exhaustive. As a result, we' ve diminished our chargebacks to only two or three cases a year.
