Hi,

This is the second time i have to pay $1000 with my own money. Someone has just gone through my online store checkout 3 weeks ago and was using a fake credit card details. Since when does me as a seller liable when someone uses a fake credit card? Doesn't the person who is in charge of the credit card have to pay for it?

How do i go about of being more careful so this doesn't happen again?

Not a happy person right now....

Unfortunately you're responsible in many cases. The best thing to do is check with your merchant account provider, which I take it is PayPal and ask them what you can do to check for fraudulent cards before putting through a purchase.

Did you have to deliver any products? Or are you just out the extra fees on the chargeback?

The same thing has happened to me a few times.

Sorry to tell you this, but the merchant is liable in this type of case, always. There are unfortunately a lot of businesses who will launder money from stolen credit cars, so it's partly a fraud prevention thing. But more, it's a cost of doing business; if consumers were hit with thousands of dollars for using a credit card - or PayPal - no one would use them. Which would put the financial services out of business, but also a lot of web companies, probably like yours.

Do you accept different shipping and billing addresses? As a customer that's pretty inconvenient, but it protects the merchant. How long did it take from when the card went thruogh to when you got notified? Is that too long to make people wait?

this time it took 2-3 weeks to be notify. last time it took 2 months...

not sure what 2 do... feel like closing my online business down if this is something that is going to happen more than once.

There are things you can do to minimize the risk. I have my site set up now where I have to manually approve things before it gets sent through my merchant account. I can usually check a couple of quick things to determine if the order is real.

Try some searches for credit card fraud merchant protection or something like that. There's applications you can add to your site that will require a phone call as a check.

Don't close your business though. You'll probably always have some stolen cards get through, but I think if you research it a little there are ways to prevent a lot of it.

Sorry this had to happen though. Like I said it's happened to me and it's no fun.