BECAREFUL! Credit Card fraud is rampant

So, this is my first post without a picture included. Just had something to say about Christmas and all. It's supposed to be the season of giving and receiving. Everyone around the World is doing just that, only that there are people who misunderstands the concept of giving and receiving. Yes, they are giving away or maybe if they're on a more selfish side, receiving for themselves a lot of things from the the many internet merchants, people like me - for free. The gifts to them even comes with real Christmassy messages like "Merry Christmas, Nikolov" or "Thank you Miro" and then he requests for a gift card to go with the gift. If you're still wondering what I'm talking about, in a more serious note, it's called credit card fraud. The fraudsters out there are getting smarter. They know we are able to check IP addresses, phone numbers, reverse address checks and all. They can get through normal payment methods which requires even the last 3 digits behind the credit cards. This Bulgarian fraudster can even detect real card owner's address and phone number that when we call to check, there actually is such a person. How many times have we sent items to this Bulgarian without detecting fraud? A total of 5 times. 5 TIMES!!! That is a lot of money! More than what I've put aside for fraud cases. And who pays? When the real credit card owner sees a charge on his credit card, they inform their bank which informs our merchant bank and since all e-commerce business charges credit cards without signatures, we have to bear the loss. Not only the loss of the cost of our products, we've also paid for shipping and worse, we have to refund the fraudulent amount to the credit card holder. How's that for an e-commerce business? Nothing is fair. E-commerce businesses are always at a loss in these instances. Some have even gone bankrupt due to this.

On the other hand, we, the merchant would try to call the banks to resolve this. First thing - they tell us that we are supposed to call the authorisation centre to verify fraudulent transactions. Yes, we can do that for every suspected case but you know when you make that call, the first thing they ask you is for the credit card numbers and expiry date. At this point, your blood pressure goes up a little - you never get the credit card numbers for security purpose. Your merchant bank processes the payments when they receive data from the customer's credit card bank. So how on earth can we verify any credit card? And this is supposed to be our fault. So next, we tell them that this has happened 5 times, we have the customer's details, address, phone number, even the customer's signature. Now think about this. This customer has been stealing credit card details (God knows how when all the credit cards belong to Americans and he's in Bulgaria), using the credit card to buy things on the internet for himself and maybe sells them off to others when he receives it. This means he's robbed 3 people in the process - the credit card owner (twice - rob his details and rob him again when he uses it), the merchant (me) and the person he sells the 'stolen' goods to. I swear this is a more serious offence than having a dog in your apartment (in this country, we cannot have dogs living in apartments but everything else is fine, so my dog is now called a 'pig') and yet the authorities are more concerned on the dogs living in aprtments rather than daylight robbers like this. When I called the bank to lodge a report, all they could say to me was this "Well, why don't you just don't do anything till you receive a chargeback? Sometimes the credit card owners don't notice". Yeah right! This is how it's supposed to be done. Sit back, relax and hope that the credit card owners has too many transactions on his bills that he fails to notice the fraudulent one or he doesn't go through his statements at all. So, take my advice : CHECK YOUR CREDIT CARD STATEMENTS IN DETAIL. No matter how busy you are, these fraudsters are professionals. Also don't assume that your credit card is always in your wallet. Have you thought about the times when you give your credit card to the waiters/waitresses in restaurants and they bring it to the back where thier charge machines are? This is seriously more dangerous than buying something online where your credit card goes through secured payment gateways where no one sees your credit card details. If I knew this Bulgarian guy, I would love to hire him myself. I'm sure he's real good in programming.

So much for Christmas and the upcoming of e-commerce businesses. Pity what Christmas means to these fraudsters.

And before I forget, Merry Chrsitmas everyone!