We’ve gotten some emails about our post yesterday and we thought it’d be great to offer our readers even more methods to prevent credit card fraud for online merchants. Some friends who are seasoned online merchants have even stepped forward to let us in on common sense techniques to stop fraudulent transactions from hurting their business. Here are 5 effective tips that can help you prevent credit card fraud.

Tip 1: It pays to be suspicious
Be vigilant is scanning each order and watch out for information that may raise warning bells. These signs usually indicate fraudsters at work and you should scrutinize each transaction for credit card fraud.

Tip 2: Scrutinize each email address
Besides being suspicious of free email accounts like those provided by Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and even Gmail, you should be able to spot and be suspicious of email addresses that contain random characters. They may be randomly generated. Also, try to see if the email address matches your customer’s name. Something is wrong if you have one “Jane Brown” placing an order with an email address like “jackie_blue459@hotmail.com”

Tip 3: Be wary of high-risk countries
Countries like Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa are classified as high-risk. While it’s not really advisable to discriminate against them all the time, it would be wise to practice precautions. Some merchants chose to disallow international shipping but if you do the same, you may miss out on a sizable chunk of business. Additionally, items shipped to port locations like Miami and Los Angeles may especially if a shipping mismatch has been detected. Fraudsters have been known to buy goods with stolen credit cards and shipping them off to other countries for a tidy profit.

Tip 4: Beware unusually high order amounts
If a customers orders 20 laptops that total up to tens of thousands of dollars, you may want to contact them and ask them for clarification. This is not a common purchase and if you have strong suspicions of credit card fraud, confront the customer or report this to the authorities before it’s too late.

Tip 5: Utilize IP firewall to block multiple attempts at fraud
Ask your merchant account service provider about additional information on IP firewall features. With this useful tool you can shut out fraudsters and prevent them from making multiple attempts at fraud once you’ve exposed them initially. Of course, some of the more resilient ones will try to use a proxy to mask their IPs but as long as you have set up roadblocks like a firewall, this will act as a deterrent for future fraud attacks.

Tip 6:

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