Monday, October 6, 2008

How High Risk Merchants Can Prevent Credit Card Fraud

Online merchants have to be willing to take steps to protect themselves from the many different perpetrators of credit card fraud, including: card number generators, mag stripe readers, hacked websites and dishonest employees. All of these criminals are out to use fraudulent card numbers in order to obtain the products and services of hard working high risk merchants. These merchants do not have to simply hope that their high risk transaction processor will protect them from fraud; there are very real steps that they can take themselves.

Deciding how much fraud protection to pursue really depends on how many transactions you process every day. High volume merchants may be willing to spend more to reduce chargebacks than online merchants who only process a few transactions a day. However, high risk merchants should never be more interested in closing the sale than they are in avoiding fraud and reducing chargebacks—if so, they will more than pay in the long run!

The first step towards reducing your cases of credit card fraud is to follow all of the security procedures recommended by your high risk transaction processor and the credit card companies themselves. Merchants should also carefully scrutinize the details of every transaction and look for the following red flags:

• Free email accounts
• Larger than average orders
• Rush orders
• High ticket item orders
• Multiple orders of the same item

Once the transaction has been approved by the transaction processor, it still has to go through the validation process; which means you should have a relationship with your merchant account provider that will give you the most detailed customer service possible. Visit www.highriskcreditcardprocessor.com today for more information.

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