ok guys, are there any tips to handle fraudulent credit card transactions online?

we are thinking about selling online but are concerned about fraudulent credit card transactions that have been made famous by the NIgerian Scam rings.

We have been selling by phone and email and we have caught fraudulent transations. but we have caught them because our sales person have been able to.

my question is, what security measures have you guys put in place to prevent or reduce the number of possible fraudulent credit card transactions? If you can point me to tips/companies or other suggestion for this, that would be great.

Thanks

Well it all depends on what it is that you are selling....

Personally, we run 4 sites that are buy online and all of them use manual card processing. This of course is no good if you are expecting 100's of orders a day!

We recieve the order then punch the numbers into our PDQ machine. That then comes back with "all match" if the address and CVV number match the card or "sec match only" if the address is wrong.

This helps in reducing the amount of people who are trying to use someone elses card to an extent (unless they know the address of the persons card they have nicked!)

Will you be having seperate delivery addresses for items or send only to billing addresses?
I would sugest that if the items are expensive "high risk" (tv's DVD players etc.) then they are only sent to billing addresses. That way, if it is a stolen card it wont go to the person who stole it!

Also, items over a certain amount, we always call the customer to check they are going to be around to sign for the delivery and this way you can sometimes gauge certain things about if they are genuine or not.

Only been caught out a couple of times where people have registered a fake account and fake card to a rented flat - fleeced it then did a runner...

But again, it all depends on what it is you are selling...

Thanks. You have really given me some good ideas.

We will be selling books but don't expect more than 50 orders a day. So, manual processing is one of those things we need to think about.

Do the processing on your site go through a payment gateway system too?

no, they (all work slightly different) just send an encripted email to us which we then unscramble to get the card details.

Where abouts in the world are you? cos that makes a big differance in the services available to checking valid address to cards i think.

Thanks Rolda. We are in Texas, USA but sell all over the world.