Fraud from Finland?

[Tonearm]

Have you guys seen much fraud from Finland? I've gotten a few orders from there lately which is strange. The latest one is very large.

[jecasc]

If you are not sure, insist on a secure payment method like wire transfer.

We have many customers from Finland, we ship to Finland at least 5 times a week, not a single fraudulent one in the last seven years, no problems so far.

The UK makes most of the trouble. 90% of our chargebacks so far where from the UK and people there usually do not know their own address.

[mack]

people there usually do not know their own address.

It maybe that your form isn't in uk format?

Trust me, people know their address. :)

Mack.

[piatkow]

Trust me, people know their address

Actually a lot of people don't know the correct format for their address laid down by Royal Mail.

Having said that an English person would be confused by a form that asked for "city" and "zip". The word "city" has a particular meaning that has nothing to do with the postal service. The correct terms in the UK are "Post Town" and "Post Code". "State" of course is meaningless.

With regard to badly designed forms I know of one hosting company whose forum has regular complaints from non US customers claiming that they are unable to register because there is no "not applicable" option on the "State" drop down menu.

[PCInk]

I agree. Usually it is the form that creates a non-existent address, not the customer.

Can you input 6 characters into the postcode (zip) field? If not, most of the UK won't easily be able to order and since the UK postcode has a space in it, you will really need to accept 7 chars. It seems most US sites only allow 5 characters.

On the other hand there are cases where people don't know their own address. For example, someone moves into a UK street and asks someone across the road what the postcode is. They use this for years and it can be wrong. This is because one street can have many postcodes, so even asking your neighbour can be incorrect!

[Upsmack_SEM]

Finland doesn't have AVS (Address Verification System) used by US credit card processors, so cards with billing addresses originating in that area can as easily be fraud as any other country that doesn't have an effective means of prevention.

I would strongly suggest running down a short check-list to keep an eye out for credit card fraud. For example, not all free email addresses are associated with criminals, but most criminals have free email addresses. Do a Google search for the cell phone number (with dashes) and see what comes up. Track the IP of the order. There are a million things you can do to at least make a more informed decision.

Good luck to you.

[dpd1]

Sometimes it's so hard deciding whether or not to take a foreign order. I just got a request for 20 items to Uruguay the other day, which is a pretty big order for us. I think the guy was legit, but his first email asked for a quote and he didn't even say where he wanted it to go or what his company name was. I had to look up the email domain and country designator. Then on top of that, it didn't really sound like he had a firm grasp on what products he needed, or what ours would do. Plus, I knew the shipping would be very expensive, which I would have to eat if they ever did a charge-back or something. Had a similar situation for Greece the other day as well. I hate turning down business, but the whole thing made me nervous. Not so much because I thought it was a scam, but just because it felt too risky. If it had been less pieces or in the US, I would have felt better. But sometimes you get the impression that the people ordering are making a mistake, and when they figure it out, you will most likely be the one to suffer. But it's hard to predict when that is really the case.

[Upsmack_SEM]

It can be very difficult to decide whether to accept a potentially fraudulent order but if you make a good check list and don't stray from those important red flags then you should be okay. Investigate & research are your friends, believe me.

You don't want to get into a situation where your credit card processor has done so many chargebacks that they fine you or close your account completely.