The Ultimate guide to Ecommerce Fraud Prevention – 3 advanced methods to protect yourself from credit card fraud.
This article describes some considerations and prevention methods to improve the small business website owners success in selling online via a shopping cart.
Quite often fraud is not considered when selling online and only when you get a letter from your bank saying a transaction is about to be reversed, or you get an email from paypal saying your account is suspended pending an investigation is the small business website owner introduced to credit card fraud online.
Here are 3 advanced steps to reducing fraud online.
1. No Free email addresses. By not allowing free email addresses, you will immediately eliminate over 90% of credit card fraud. This is the single biggest protection method you can employ and with the right developer, you can do this very easily. Anybody can get a gmail or hotmail email address to fulfil a fake order,
however if a fraudster has a stolen credit card in their hands, they are unlikely going to use their work email address or their ISP address (Eg This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) as a simple phone call to the isp or work from the police will identify the owner of this address. Everyone on the internet had either a work email address or an ISP email address so this method of fraud prevention is great as it stops nearly all credit card fraud when employed, but it also has the added benefit of not being frustrating to your customer.
2. BIN country matching. This method applies only to website owners who have their own merchant facility. The BIN or Bank Identification Number refers to
the first 4 digits on a credit card which is used to identify the bank that issues that credit card. BIN’s are stored on publicly available databases so a well designed ecommerce payment page will run a check on the
customers BIN and report back to you that the order was placed with a card from another country or an odd bank. This is important, it allows you to identify behaviour that is at odds with the majority of your customers. For example. It is very
common for a fraudster to buy a stolen credit card number online and use it. If you only trade in Australia you can limit the use of credit cards that are not from Australia. Most web developers do not provide this level of service to their customers, Website Design Sydney does.
3. IP address country matching. Every internet user has an ip address assigned to them in order to use the internet. This number looks like 67.123.456.789. You can find yours by 
googling “What is my IP”. IP addresses are assigned regionally which means your IP address reveals what city you live in. A well designed shopping cart payment portal will run a check on the users IP address to determine what country that person lives in. If the person is in
Indonesia, you have a problem. A smart way to secure yourself is to run an IP address check in conjuction with a BIN check. If the customer is in Indonesia (a common Fraud country) and the credit card is from the US, you know the order is likely fraud and you can cancel the order and inform the bank that the owners card is used for suspicious activity.
If you are concerned about fraud you should contact your website designer about it. Quite often you will find they know very little about fraud online as most website developers do not actually sell things themselves online. Its sort of like a car builder that doesn’t drive their own car.
This is why fraud online has been allowed to become such a large issue because web developers don’t themselves sell online which means they wait for the website owner, their customer, to have a problem, to have thousands of dollars taken from their bank accounts, and then they look into measures to protect their customer from future credit card fraud.
Website Design Sydney is different in that we ourselves own several ecommerce websites and have gained a lot of experience in credit card fraud online. Contact us if you require assistance in setting up your shopping cart securely to help protect yourself from credit card fraud.
The Ultimate guide to Ecommerce Fraud Prevention – 3 advanced methods to protect yourself from credit card fraud.
This article describes some considerations and prevention methods to improve the small business website owners success in selling online via a shopping cart.
Quite often fraud is not considered when selling online and only when you get a letter from your bank saying a transaction is about to be reversed, or you get an email from paypal saying your account is suspended pending an investigation is the small business website owner introduced to credit card fraud online.
Here are 3 advanced steps to reducing fraud online.
1. No Free email addresses. By not allowing free email addresses, you will immediately eliminate over 90% of credit card fraud. This is the single biggest protection method you can employ and with the right developer, you can do this very easily. Anybody can get a gmail or hotmail email address to fulfil a fake order, however if a fraudster has a stolen credit card in their hands, they are unlikely going to use their work email address or their ISP address (Eg This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) as a simple phone call to the isp or work from the police will identify the owner of this address. Everyone on the internet had either a work email address or an ISP email address so this method of fraud prevention is great as it stops nearly all credit card fraud when employed, but it also has the added benefit of not being frustrating to your customer.
2. BIN country matching. This method applies only to website owners who have their own merchant facility. The BIN or Bank Identification Number refers to the first 4 digits on a credit card which is used to identify the bank that issues that credit card. BIN’s are stored on publicly available databases so a well designed ecommerce payment page will run a check on the customers BIN and report back to you that the order was placed with a card from another country or an odd bank. This is important, it allows you to identify behaviour that is at odds with the majority of your customers. For example. It is very common for a fraudster to buy a stolen credit card number online and use it. If you only trade in Australia you can limit the use of credit cards that are not from Australia. Most web developers do not provide this level of service to their customers, Website Design Sydney does.
3. IP address country matching. Every internet user has an ip address assigned to them in order to use the internet. This number looks like 67.123.456.789. You can find yours by googling “What is my IP”. IP addresses are assigned regionally which means your IP address reveals what city you live in. A well designed shopping cart payment portal will run a check on the users IP address to determine what country that person lives in. If the person is in
Indonesia, you have a problem. A smart way to secure yourself is to run an IP address check in conjuction with a BIN check. If the customer is in Indonesia (a common Fraud country) and the credit card is from the US, you know the order is likely fraud and you can cancel the order and inform the bank that the owners card is used for suspicious activity.
If you are concerned about fraud you should contact your website designer about it. Quite often you will find they know very little about fraud online as most website developers do not actually sell things themselves online. Its sort of like a car builder that doesn’t drive their own car. This is why fraud online has been allowed to become such a large issue because web developers don’t themselves sell online which means they wait for the website owner, their customer, to have a problem, to have thousands of dollars taken from their bank accounts, and then they look into measures to protect their customer from future credit card fraud.
Website Design Sydney is different in that we ourselves own several ecommerce websites and have gained a lot of experience in credit card fraud online. Contact us if you require assistance in setting up your shopping cart securely to help protect yourself from credit card fraud.