11 Signs of Online Payment Processing Fraud

There are some online payment processing signs that can help you spot fraud. By itself, any one of them can have a perfectly legitimate explanation, but if more than one are of them are present in one transaction, it needs to be carefully evaluated before processing it.

11 Signs of Online Payment Processing Fraud

Following are 11 such signs, which should alert merchants accepting credit cards in a card-not-present setting of the probability that a fraudulent order may be taking place.

1. First-time customers. Fraudsters are constantly on a lookout for new victims. After they commit fraud on your website, they will simply move on to another and don't return.
2. Bigger-than-average sales amounts. Stolen payment cards have a very limited life span so fraudsters always try to make a quick work of them. Big sales are the most typical way of achieving that.
3. Sales for many items of the same sort. Much like with large sales amounts, buying several items of the same sort is a kind of maximizing profit from stolen cards as fast as possible.
4. Big-ticket sales. Big-ticket products have a high resale value, which helps criminals maximize their profits.
5. Orders with overnight delivery. As it should be expected, criminals are not all that concerned with delivery charges and far more likely than real shoppers to make orders with an overnight or another type of a rushed shipping.
6. Foreign delivery addresses. A huge number of fraudulent sales are ordered with foreign addresses. The Address Verification Service (AVS) only works for British addresses, other than the U.S.
7. Like credit card numbers. There is a huge number of software services for generating credit card numbers, like CreditMaster. These credit card account numbers are usually very similar.
8. Several orders shipped to the same address. These orders can indicate the usage of a stolen stack of cards or of fraudulently manufactured card account numbers.
9. Multiple sales placed with a single card in a short time period. Such sales may indicate that a criminal is trying to run up a stolen card account's credit line as quickly as possible, prior to the the card being closed.
10. Several delivery addresses. Similarly to the last item, a card account may be used multiple times in a very short period of time, with the sales orders placed with multiple shipping addresses.
11. Multiple sales placed from one IP address. Such sales may point to multiple orders placed from the same computer, even if multiple names and shipping addresses were used.