What is the best defense against fraud attacks? A well educated merchant!
Cybercriminals are getting more sophisticated each day, taking millions of dollars in credit card theft through chargebacks every year. That is why it is very important that you stay vigilant against potential credit card scammers by implementing the tips and best practices we have listed for you on this page.
Tips for Accepting Payments Online
If possible, always swipe, tap or insert a physical card! If you type in the card information you will incur a higher fee and more chargebacks due to human error.
Clearly post your return policy and print it on the physical receipt so there is no confusion at the time of a return.
If you have a pin pad, see if your customer would like to run their card as debit. That will cut down on fees and enable the safest transactions through the pin validation.
Accepting mail and telephone orders.
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Obtain authorization for every sale and only ship to permanent addresses. Try to avoid P.O boxes and hotel lobbies.
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Send a copy of a sales draft and order form to customers and make sure to keep all copies for your recorders.
Making an ecommerce sale.
- Reject orders if every piece of information isn’t provided.
- Be cautious if there is a difference between the “bill to” and “ship to” address. Someone could be sending a gift but it is best to call and make sure.
Other practices for fighting fraud
- Contacting the issuing bank to validate the cards you believe could have been tampered with.
- Batching daily to ensure lower interchange rates.
- Requesting signatures and ensuring that they match the name on the cards.
- Using fraud prevention tools like CVC, CVC2 and CVV codes.
- Use Address Verification Service (AVS) to verify cardholders billing address with the card issuers records for the verification process.
PCI Compliance 101
We are always working hard to protect both businesses and customers from credit card scams, which includes helping you be PCI compliant. We are always updating our solutions to remedy any compliance issues, but the responsibility for maintaining your PCI compliance ultimately rests on you!
12 basic requirements for PCI compliance are the following:
- Install and maintain a firewall to protect your cardholders data.
- Do not use vendor-supplied defaults for the system passwords and other security parameters.
- Protect all stored cardholder data.
- Encrypt transmission of cardholder data throughout open and public networks.
- Use and keep an updated anti-virus software.
- Develop and maintain secure systems and applications.
- Restrict access to data by businesses to need-to-know.
- Assign a unique ID to each individual person that has computer access.
- Restrict physical access to all cardholder data.
- Track and monitor all access to network resources and the cardholder data.
- Regularly check and test all security systems and processes.
- Maintain a policy that is effective and addresses information security.
The very latest in encryption and tokenization.
The best ways to protect your data from credit card fraud is a comprehensive approach that includes:
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Certified, point-to-point encryption that will encode sensitive cardholder info before it goes into the authorization stage
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Military-grade tokenization that replaces the customer account numbers with tokens or values that have no meaning to fraudsters.
The EMV liability shift explained.
The adoption of EMV or “chip cards” as the standard for card issuers and merchants is underway. In Oct. 2015, the liability for credit card was shifted from card issuers to whomever ub the trasctaction process has the lesser technology. We make it easy to protect your business from fraud by offering the biggest possible range of up-to-the-minute EMV solutions.