The following checks can help to identify a fraudster. Consider implementing them as risk indicators in your managing fraud procedures:
Email - free-site email addresses (for example, noname@mail.com), carry a higher risk than those provided by an ISP that require the user to register properly (for example, noname@aol.com). Free email also offers a route to create a convincing looking address such as drwatson@consultant.com.
Check email addresses - try opening the domain of the email in a browser (such as, www.consultant.com in the above example). You may find the domain isn't registered or is registered in another country.
If the domain looks ok, send an email to the email address supplied to confirm that it exists, if it doesn’t it may be returned by your email server as undeliverable. Note that the delay before the response is received depends on your email server and may be several hours, to determine the typical delay you should send some test mails to non-existent email addresses.
Shoppers often make mistakes when entering their email addresses and some of these are easy to pick up, such as another character where the '@' symbol should be, misspelling of .co.uk, .com, etc. You may also be able to detect obvious misspelling by comparing the name with the email address.
If you aren’t able to identify an obvious problem and if the email address cannot be delivered, you should try to contact the shopper on the telephone number provided.
IP address - the IP address is a unique identifying number given to a PC, usually by an Internet Service Provider (ISP), when it connects to the internet. An ISP will reuse IP addresses as users connect and disconnect but the addresses will always be from a specific range allocated to the ISP.
Check the IP address supplied on the order confirmation with free IP address lookup at http://ipaddress.com/ip-lookup/ and verify that the IP country matches the billing country.
The Risk Management service enables you to automatically block transactions from IP addresses that you know from experience have been associated with fraud in the past. As IP addresses are re-used, blocking a single address is usually a short-term remedy as the shopper can reconnect to the ISP and get a new IP address. Screening a range of addresses is much more powerful.
However, blocking any address should be approached with caution. You could easily block a very wide range of addresses and accidentally include a significant portion of another ISP’s users such as AOL.
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