Recognizing online fraudulent orders
Every once in a while I receive a “suspicious” order. I call it suspicious because there are some aspects of the order that look fishy… The first time it happened, I didn’t follow my instinct… but I should have. And I told myself it would not happen again.
When I tell people about that, they are always curious as to how I can tell which ones are fraudulent. Here is a fresh example, from last night. (You will understand that I blurred the more sensitive info, even if I doubt you could make anything out of it).
First clue: The buyer chooses a shipping service that almost costs more than the actual item he bought.
Second clue: the address is confusing. When you are “really” paying for something, you usually make sure you will receive it, right? In this case, Accra (Gh) is actually in Ghana, not Germany.
Another clue, which is of less import, but can add to the suspicion, the email address is at a public domain such as hotmail, gmail or yahoo, not at an identifiable location such as a workplace.
The first thing I do whenever this happens, is to check the invoice details on my online terminal, to check if the “invoice to” address is the same as the invoice shipping address of the credit card company. I also validate if CVV code is right (the 3 or 4 digits in the back of the credit card).
But first of all, here is an interesting thing: the buyer tried 3 different times before, without success, to make the purchase with different cards numbers.
In this case, no surprise: nothing corresponds.
Even though our bank systems are pretty secure, it is still note full proof. We can still get a credit card approval on stolen credit card numbers. The CVV validation is an additional security validation for online retailers, but it is not mandatory for the transaction to be approved by the issuing bank (but it is mandatory in my store!)
In Europe, they have a PIN number for their credit cards, and most retailers (online and offline) are equipped to process these. I wonder when our financial institutions will follow suit.