paymentI’ve encountered a lot of credit card fraud in the past year, and learned just how easy it is for fraudsters to buy things with stolen cards online.
In my case it was still manageable as the order amounts were small, but how is it possible for anyone to sell big ticket items such as flatscreen TVs or laptops online? It seems the losses would be catastrophic.
If someone would say buy a new MacBook Pro with a stolen card online, and then the real owner of the card would dispute the transaction, wouldn’t the merchant then be one laptop poorer? It seems it wouldn’t take much to negate any margins.
With items over $500, especially if they are a new customer, I typically will call and confirm the order by saying the following:
Hello Bob, this is so-and-so from company. We see a large order has been placed and wanted to confirm the order. May you verify your full name, billing and shipping address if different, and last four digits of credit card number? - Great, we will have this shipped out shortly to you once our credit department processes your order. Thank you.
If you don’t get an answer, leave a voicemail asking to call back to confirm.
Doing this will prevent a lot of theft. I’ve had people hang up before or say don’t worry about it - I ordered by mistake.
Sellers of Big Ticket items mostly would be big men (Like Amazon sellers who have years of expertise selling online and offline). They handle cash and goods with exceptional brilliance and they know and will mostly be experienced in what handling the bad that can happen. They will surely have this estimate of loses and gains. To be clear, they will play safe by
Confirming the order after a day or in 5-6 hours. Starting the shipment late. This time would mostly be sufficient for the card owner to get a notification via SMS or email and find that the card is missing and report to the bank.
Ship or deliver from a local vendor to the address of shipment so that the vendor can know a bit more about the person or place to which the package is getting delivered.
Small businesses that ship popular/mainstream big ticket items usually don’t make it. It’s mainly big companies with large teams dedicated to manually reviewing orders and approving them for shipment–and this is on top of automated screening to prevent bad sales. Even with this, they suffer big losses annually, but they process so many orders that they can afford it and keep their accounts in good standing.
Try using a payment gateway that includes a fraud risk engine, or include a fraud detection engine yourself. Cybersource for instance, thells you whether the credit card, the shipping address and/or email have been involved in a fraud. They will of course charge you a fee for each trtansaction.
All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.