Fraud Prevention

There are some good business practices that will eliminate almost all fraud. Below are some basic fraud prevention techniques, and a few advanced ones:

•  Hold all checks or money orders for at least 10 days, until they clear, before shipping.

•  Always make sure your payment gateway settings are set to check CVN and address.

•  Look at your shopping cart and payment gateway to see if a payment on an order was declined multiple times before it was accepted. This could be a sign of someone trying different credit cards to find a good one, or typing random numbers to guess the CVN.

•  International credit card orders are more difficult to verify. Require large or suspicious orders to wire transfer money, which is much more difficult to reverse.

•  Only ship to billing address on international orders.

•  If the shipper allows for it, do not allow a package to be forwarded to a different address.

If the order is being shipped to a different address than the billing address or seems odd, you can use some or all of these techniques to judge if it's suspicious:

•  Run a reverse address check using websites like whitepage.com to see if the name at the addresses matches the name on the order.

•  Run a reverse phone number check using websites like whitepage.com to see if the address for the phone number matches the one on the order. This is only useful if it comes back to the billing address. If the order is fraud, the thief is probably at, or watching the shipping address. A lot of people give their cell phone numbers when placing an order, so if the reverse number check comes back to a cell phone, that's inconclusive as to whether it belongs to the credit card owner, or a thief.

•  Call the credit card issuer and find out if the phone number given is the same one that's on the credit card account.

•  If the given phone number is a cell phone; run a reverse address check on the billing address. If there's a phone number with the billing address, you can call the listed phone number to check out the order information, and make sure the credit card owner is aware of the order.

•  Google Maps is your friend! It's the next best thing to being at the locations. Use it to judge distance between the billing and shipping address to see if it's reasonable for a person to travel that distance to receive their order. Use the satellite image or street views to see if the addresses look like what they should be. If the shipping address is a place of business, does the building look like it's a business? If the shipping address is in a port town, does the location look like it may be a shipping company?

•  Google everything! Names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. You can get a wealth of information that can help you decide whether or not an order is legitimate.