Protecting yourself from fraud

Credit Card fraud is a major problem around the world. When you accept a fraudulent payment, you could be held financially responsible for the loss. But it’s hard! It seems that whenever security and technologies are improved fraudsters find new and innovative ways to take your hard earned cash. That’s why it's important to stay ever vigilant fighting fraud, and reducing its impact on your company. Fraud comes in many shapes and forms, but it happens with both card-present and card-not-present transactions.

 

The good news is the widespread adoption of chip card technology has drastically reduced reported card-present fraud (Visa’s September 2018 chip card update  reported that merchants who had completed the EMV chip upgrade witnessed an 82% drop in counterfeit fraud dollars in-store from September 2015 to June 2018). Considering card-not-present is more widespread and harder to fight, we’ll focus there.

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Protecting yourself from Card-not-Present Fraud

 

As in-person fraud detection improved, fraudsters turned increasingly to virtual environments. There are many ways fraudsters operate, but in most instances fraudsters have gotten access to personal information by hacking online accounts and databases.

 

The first step in protecting yourself against fraud is successfully identifying the potential warning signs of fraud such as:
 

• The shipping address and billing address differ

• Multiple orders of the same item

• Unusually large orders

• Multiple orders to the same address with different cards

• Unexpected international orders

 

This also illustrates how difficult it is to fight online fraud as none of the warning signs are iron-clad guarantees. Perfectly legitimate transactions can feature any number of these warning signs. To help protect your business from fraud, leverage fraud management tools found within the AND Payment Gateway.
 

Set Appropriate fraud filters

 

Nobody knows your business as well as you do - you know buying patterns and orders/activity that might not feel “right”. It’s important to listen to your gut as well as use technology to aid your decision making in identifying fraud. Using your unique knowledge of your business, set limits for the number of purchases and total dollar value you’ll accept from an account in a day. This can help keep your exposure to a minimum should fraud occur. You can also set the amount of transactions you’ll accept on a given day, a given hour, transactions you’ll accept from a particular IP address or region you feel produces more risk than you're comfortable with.

 

Use an Address Verification Service (AVS) and Credit Verification Value (CVV)

 

An AVS service cross-references the street number and ZIP used by the customer during the transaction with the address linked to that consumer’s credit card issuer in real-time. If there are any discrepancies, the transaction can be flagged or declined. Similarly inputting the CVV (the three or 4 digit number unique to the credit card) compares the number provided by the customer against the number on file with the credit card issuer. What is so effective about inputting CVV is PCI guidelines prevent the storing of CVV data - so a valid CVV helps verify the customer has the physical card with them when the order is placed.

 

Use a secure payment gateway

 

It’s best to use a gateway that encrypts and or tokenizes customer payment information. Working together, data tokenization and encryption help reduce the impact of a data breach. Both tools let you process transactions while also protecting the payment data.

 

Lookup the card BIN

 

The first six numbers listed on a credit card is the Bank Identification Number (BIN). It gives you details about the financial institution that issued the card. You can use a free BIN check service to find out where the card was issued. Be cautious if the billing address country and the card issuer country don’t match.