Anyone with real sales with their e-commerce website will eventually have a day where a hacker/thief is attempting to buy goods on your website with a stolen credit card.

There could be hundreds and even thousands of attempts.  

Your mailbox fills up with declined card notifications.

Your annoyed and distracted all day.

You may even receive a call from your credit card company to discuss this suspicious activity.

Finally you will contact one of us here at Website Forge and ask for it all to stop.  

Something like "Can you block this person from attempting to charge this card over and over?"

And here is the answer:

IF the person is making these attempts from the SAME IP address -- YES.

However if they are using many IP addresses, which are usually spoofed, then - NO.  

Not without risking blocking actual good customers that might buy.  And this is usually the case.

See. IP addresses are generally "Static" or never change on a server or web site.  However, IP addresses are generally reused and change often on the consumer side.  

The IP address is a unique number used to identify the machine.

Since your customers are intiating the visit to your web site -- their IP address only needs to be the same for that session.  Not always.

So if you start blocking all sorts of IP addresses -- you just risk blocking valid users from your store.

What other effects can this have?

Well I know of a customer that had his PayPal account locked out because of too many fraudulent attempts.  Not his fault.  They locked him out anyways.  

I received a call at 7am on a Sunday.  And we mitigated his situation.  He wasn't very happy at all with PayPal.

SIDENOTE:  This is one of the many reasons PayPal is not the best credit card processing solution.

Some customers are later called by the FBI to help figure out who was doing this.  Because you weren't the only one getting hammered.

Bottom line:  If this happens to you.  You are on the map!  Yes this means you are somebody :)  

Because it seems just as you become successful with sales this type of issue happens at least once.

So I look forward to your call.  Now that you know a bit more about it -- you can relax and we work on it together.

Shane Merem

e-commerce website consultant 

www.websiteforge.com