Protecting a Merchant Account from Illegal Transactions

Threats to the safety of internet users have been proportionally magnified with the technological advancements in internet. However for the merchants of e-commerce this can result in a huge loss. The risk factor is more with transactions that belong to the category of “card-not-present”. In conventional selling, the verification of card is possible with the signature of customer.

For internet businessmen, each purchase with credit card is of very high potential for being invalid. However it is possible to come out of this situation as there are several methods for detecting the genuineness of the credit card of an internet buyer.

The first step in the process is ensuring of the information provided by he customer. The information should be complete and correct. This will include phone number and full address of the customer. You will be reducing the chances of a purchase being illegal when you will have extra information entered via your website and matching whatever is present in the bank records of the card owner. Verification is another important part. The verification can happen by calling to the numbers that have been entered on the client interface. If you are not able to find these numbers, then there is a chance of them not being genuine. This means that the customer will not be the legitimate account owner.

With the service account which belongs to the category of “ecommerce merchant” you should be able to prevent chargeback. A best way is to have extra security measures for transactions that are suspicious. Both the sides of card can be faxed to you by the customer. This can be done with a government ID card also. Driving license will be suitable as the identity. You can also ask the costumer to provide you with “card security code” that is a number set seen on the card itself. Because most of the thefts associated with credit cards happens virtually without the knowledge of a customer having the credit card adds to the possibility of the person being the legitimate card holder.

Common sense can spot invalid purchases and this is not much difficult. For instance, the orders which are to be transferred to an address apart from the address indicated in the record of a card owner may be illegal. Orders coming from internet services like Gmail, Yahoo mail etc can be fraud.

Purchases that belong to the category “larger-than-normal” may come with a threat of fraud. This is possible when rush shipment is specifically required. A thief may be trying to grab the opportunity for draining the account of a person. He will know that it will be frozen soon when the theft has been reported once. Properly analyzing the orders   that are made outside the nation is necessary because you cannot verify the genuineness of a particular supplied address. So here extra care has to be taken.

So it is possible to spot illegitimate transaction in the case of a merchant account.