It is becoming increasingly important to provide documentation on your fraud prevention business practices while you are accepting credit cards on a website. WF has provided an area with each order that you can write notes about a order with out the customer seeing them. This area you should use to write notes about the steps you take to make sure a transaction is real and not a stolen credit card. By doing this you have in effect implemented a fraud prevention policy which is the key to fighting a charge back from a credit card company. We all know that the credit card company's could make things more secure but they worry about losing customers so we are left on the hook. It is left up to us merchants to police this mess. Your documentation and fraud policy practice can and will be your saving grace to help you prevent a charge back. As seen below I have the steps I have taken on my site. I also have an example of the supporting documentation to back up my fraudulent prevention business practices.
(typed in the not seen by the customer field)
CCV Good
AVR Good
Ip trace Good
Phone call made to Bank and customer. Good. Ok to Ship BDS. Time is O700 date is July 11 2007.
(May Favorite) Customer was difficult rude and used threatening language do not ship any orders to this person.
Also you can use this area to make notes about difficult customers. This could protect you from denial of service claims later on.
How do I start a fraud protection policy?
My suggestion is this.
1. Implement a fraud protection policy for your business that is written down and all orders over a certain amount you should do a trace back and a reverse ip address look up to make sure it came from the area the order is coming from.
2. Get the telephone numbers of issuing banks and make a phone call to check to see if the card is stolen.
3. When in doubt about a order check it out.
Jerry at partsguyusa.com is a very knowledgeable person about this stuff too. Perhaps he has some tips we all could learn from here too.
As always,
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Brian