Prepaid Card Filtering

Many merchants engaged in recurring payment, installment payment, or deferred billing experience some loss due to fraud schemes that make use of prepaid cards. Consider the case of a consumer using a prepaid card with a balance of $100 to make a purchase that involves an initial charge of $50 followed by three installments of $50 each. The authorization would be approved for the initial transaction, and the card might have adequate balance for an additional charge, but if the consumer was attempting to defraud the merchant or simply used the card for other purchases, the card may not have sufficient balance for any additional payments. While the Prepaid Indicator feature provides you with the information necessary to make a decision at the time of the sale, and to request a secondary or different payment method, instead you may wish to have Worldpay filter these transactions automatically when you send the Authorization transaction.

If you elect to use the Prepaid Card Filtering Service, you can select one of two methods of implementation. Using the first filtering method, our system declines all Authorization and Sale transactions when the consumer uses a prepaid card. Upon a decline, the system returns a Response Reason Code of 309 - Restricted Card - Prepaid Card Filtering Service. This method also allows you to disable the filtering logic on a transactional basis by including the <prepaid> element set to a value of false, allowing you to accept any prepaid card for these transactions.

The second method of implementing the Prepaid Card Filtering Service is per transaction. To enable the filter on a particular transaction, set the <prepaid> element to a value of true. This method is useful to a merchant who offers products with both one-time payments and installment payments. For products involving a single payment, you may want to allow the use of prepaid cards, while for the product with multiple payments you may want to filter prepaid cards.

Within either implementation method, you can elect to filter all prepaid cards, or only non-reloadable prepaid cards. Please speak to your Implementation Consultant for additional information about setting these global parameters.