AVS / Gateway Help Please!

Questions about AVS, Security, and $1 "authing"

[seospeedwagon]

I work with some people who are developing a free tournament website that may payout small and large amounts of prize money to many people.

Because the tournament is free, we do not ask for credit card at time of entry and have no way of avs-checking a user before they begin to play. However, for security purposes, we would like to avs-check a person (to ensure they live where they say they do, and for other reasons) before they collect any prize money, but we do NOT wish to charge them anything. Verisign and Cybersource suggested they could do a $1 authorization (as the gateway partner) to do AVS, but when signing up for an Internet Merchant Account, we were told by the merchant account provider (a reputable bank) that they "absolutely would not do a fake $1 authorization because it did not comply with visa/mc rules). We are now in a bind (not to mention I don't really understand who does the $1 Auth, the gateway or the merchant account provider?). I should point out too that we will eventually be doing eCommerce too, and when a user puts a credit card on file and undergoes AVS, we will eventually let them shop too (which is good for the credit card companies), but that could come way later and we need an AVS solution now.

Any help would be supremely appreciated.

[otc_cmnn]

There are so many issues here but...

Do you really expect people to give their cc info to join a 'free' tourney? CC info is highly gaurded, its a struggle getting people to cough up real email addresses let alone cc info. Your conversion rates will be dismal!

If you tell me 'You have won a prize! Just give me your CC info so that we can verify your indentity!' I'll be reporting YOU to the authorities as a crook.

There are many effective ways to determine if a person is who/where they claim to be outside of the AVS system.

Use tools like:
www.Number.com
www.anywho.com
the google phonebook tool
and various reverse address look up tools to check that names, addresses and phone numbers match.

Use Geo IP tools to check that someone is where they say there are.

You'll never know 100% of the time but if you can be mostly right most of the time and filter out the stupid crooks(98%) you'll be much farther ahead.

[Corey Bryant]

When does your game start and when would you be doing the pre-authorization?

One thing that you could consider doing, if the cost was $100.00, try to do a pre-auth for this. And then you might have a chance that the pre-auth is still there when you are ready.

If you do not do an AVS though when you do the sale, the MAP might charge you a higher discount rate as well for not doing AVS

-Corey