Top tip: Helping to avoid Credit Card Fraud

As the amount of online commerce grows, so too does its visibility to potential fraudsters. There are steps that you can take as an online merchant to help reduce your exposure to fraud. Here are some useful tips that may help you.

• If you suspect a fraud refund the transaction. This reduces your exposure, sends a message to the fraudster that you mean business, and means you won't get a "charge back" later (a debit on your account reversing the funds you received).
• If you accept credit cards in your site, use a method that includes a CVV number. CVV numbers are 3 or 4 digit codes that usually appear on the back of a credit card but are not encoded into the magnetic stripe. Most online fraud comes from stolen credit card numbers rather than stolen cards, so this method can help reduce the risk of card fraud.
• Real time checking: If your website uses real-time card checking then potential fraud can be determined 'at source' and a potentially fraudulent transaction avoided.
• 'BIN' check: The BIN number is the first six digits of a credit card. From this number you can identify the issuing bank and country. Services such as eWays Beagle interpret this information for you in your transaction report to help you identify a customer whose account details, country and card do not match up, and investigate further.
• Check whether the postcode and address exists: You can use Google or Google Maps for this. If the customer's address is in China, how can they have a US postcode?
• Avoid transactions from high risk countries like Malaysia, Russia, India etc
• Ask international customers for more information like a scanned copy of a utility bill verifying their address, and a scanned copy of the physical credit card used to make the order.
• Do not allow customers to sign up with free email accounts like hotmail.com, mac.com, yahoo.com, gmail.com, msn.com etc.
• Do not allow customers to only sign up with mobile phone numbers. Otherwise you can't contact them or trace them.
• Look up the IP address of the customer - does the country it was in match the billing or shipping addresses? You can find many free tools on Google to do this.
• Check telephone numbers exist and match up with the postcode. Sites like http://www.freeality.com/finde.htm and http://www.theultimates.com/  may help
• If you offer downloadable products, include only a short term activation code when downloading. When all your fraud checks are complete you can email a full code at that point.