(MOTO AVS users only)
This topic contains tips and procedures for preventing fraudulent credit card transactions. These tips apply to both web site and telephone orders.
Train employees to recognize suspicious orders and suspicious customer behavior. You should also develop in-house policies and procedures for handling irregular or suspicious transactions— for example, unusually large orders— and provide appropriate training for your sales staff. Being able to recognize suspicious orders may be particularly important if your business involves telephone sales (although many of these tips apply equally well to Internet sales), and you should give your employees clear instructions on the steps to take to verify these transactions.
Most importantly, if you do process a fraudulent order, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Call the police, file a report. By taking action and getting criminals caught, you may be persuading some "would be" criminal to reconsider.
Employees processing Internet and telephone sales should be on the look-out for any of the following signs of suspicious customer behavior:
Hesitation: Beware of customers who hesitate or seem uncertain when giving you personal information, such as a zip code or the spelling of a street or family name. This is often a sign that the person is using a false identity.
Rush orders: Beware of urgent requests for quick or overnight delivery; the customer who "needs it yesterday" should be a red flag for possible fraud. While often perfectly valid, rush orders are one of the common characteristics of "hit and run" fraud schemes aimed at obtaining merchandise for quick resale.
Random orders: Watch out for customers who don’t seem to care if a particular item is out of stock— "You don’t have it in red? What colors do you have?"— or customers who order haphazardly— "I’ll take one of everything!" Orders of this kind may be intended for resale rather than personal use.
Large rush orders: Beware of large orders (10 Makita cordless drills, for example) that are requesting overnight shipment. Make sure you know the actual card holder is doing the ordering. Thieves don’t care about the price. They are not going to pay anyway.
Suspicious shipping address: Scrutinize and flag any order with a ship-to address that is different from the billing address on the cardholder’s account. Requests to ship merchandise to post office boxes or an office address are often associated with fraud. In addition, you should keep lists of zip codes where high fraud rates are common and verify any order that has a ship-to address in these areas. If your business does not typically service foreign customers, use caution when shipping to addresses outside the USA— particularly if you are dealing with a new customer or a very large order.
Free email addresses: Do not accept credit card orders from free email addresses such as Hotmail or Yahoo. It is almost impossible to track down who is at the other end of a free email address. The following site has a script that will automatically screen email addresses for you: http://www.antifraud.com. Ninety percent of fraudulent orders are placed using anonymous email addresses. If the customer is using their dialup or another POP account, you have some recourse by contacting the provider to find out who owns that email address.