Strategies for Reducing Fraud

We take fraud seriously and look to consistently educate our merchants with ways to reduce these types of charges. Knowing how to reduce fraudulent charges and training your employees on these tips can save your business time and money. Our state-of-the-art systems already have fraud prevention in place, but with further business practices on your end, you will be able to have more strategic ways to protect yourself.

Strategic Ways to Reduce Fraudulent Charges:

When Manually Entering a Transaction
Be sure to use our Address Verification Service (AVS) and Card Security Code (CVC2, CVV2 and CID) tools when manually entering transactions. AVS compares the cardholders billing address provided to you to the billing address on file with the credit card issuing bank. If the billing address is different, you will get an immediate response.

Card security codes are the three digit codes printed on the signature panel on the back of Visa, MasterCard, and Discovered issued cards or the four digit code printed on the front of American Express cards. You will want to have this information provided to you by your customers when manually entering cardholder data at your point-of-sale. If your customer provides you with the card security code and the systems gives you an alert that it does not match what the issuer has on file, you will want to confirm this number with your customer. If attempted again and given an additional error response, the card may not be present and you may want to decline the transaction until you can further validate the transaction. If the customer is unable to provide you with the card security code, the card is not present and that card number provided has possibly been stolen.

Within Your Organization
You want to train your staff to request required data when taking credit card information from your customers. This information will include card type, card number, expiration date, card security code, customer's cardholder billing information, and the card issuing bank's name. If the customer is unwilling or cannot provide this information, the card may have been stolen.

Another way to have a list of fraudulent activity and being able to prevent future fraud is to create a fraud list that includes fraudulent names, addresses, and numbers with which you have experienced fraud. You will also want to carefully examine orders that are higher than average dollar amounts to verify that it is not a fraudulent charge. Also, beware of shipping products to P.O. boxes; it is always safer to ship exclusively to a physical mailing addresses.

Internal Fraud
Fraud within the workplace is something that all business owners need to deal with. Things to watch out for are employees submitting a refund to their own or someone else's credit card. This can be monitored by placing a password on your point-of-sale unit for refunds. You will also want to watch for employees that will purchase goods from your store with one of your customer's cards or a stolen credit card. In addition, monitoring daily receipts and matching the original sale and refund amounts with the credit card information is a great way to protect your business from this type of fraud.