Checking / verifying addresses

What do you use to check customers address?

[budgie]

I was wondering what services you found were the most effective for checking addresses of customers you weren't sure of? We use Worldpay so addresses are generally checked and verified, but some require a little more investigation. We usually use online phone books and that sort of thing to do this, but does anyone else have some good tips, particularly for US addresses?

[FalseDawn]

Using phone books sounds horribly cumbersome to me.
How would you define a "customer you aren't sure of" anyway?
In my case, I use authorize.net, so if the address checks out there, and the order isn't for a ridiculous amount, I consider it fairly safe.

Also, why do some addresses require a little more verification? I don't understand - surely, this is worldpay's job - if they can't guarantee a correct address by their own internal checks, what makes you think any checking you do will help?

[budgie]

Unfortunately it's not as simple as relying on Worldpay to check the addresses, as in some cases they're not able to verify some overseas addresses, simply because they/the bank aren't set up to do it automatically. We however can manually verify the address. If the address matches, of course then it's fine - it's only for those that Worldpay can't check in the first place.

It doesn't matter if the bank authorises the transaction - they'll authorise pretty much anything and we as the retailer are going to pay if it's fraudulent, so I wouldn't want to rely on that if the address verification comes back from Worldpay as Not Checked.

[FalseDawn]

I still don't understand - how exactly do you expect to verify an overseas address? Are you just checking that it is actually a valid address, or do you have any financial details to cross-reference against?
Just being a valid address is no safeguard against it being a fraudulent transaction.

[budgie]

We're looking to see if the person actually lives at the address given as the billing address. If they do, and the other security measures match like the CCV number then it's obviously more likely to be a valid order than one where we couldn't check whether that person lived at that address.

[HRoth]

I've been using MaxMind, which is free software, to get a probability that a foreign charge is fraudulent when I feel it is iffy. You put in the ip address, real-world address, bin if you have it, and phone number, and it gives you a score. This is an easy way to find out if the ip address is, for instance, in another country than the alleged billing address.

The other thing I use is the White Pages online. I have authorize.net set not to reject for no match on address, because often po boxes or streets named after numbers don't verify. So I try to do a reverse phone number search. But with all the cell phones, that doesn't work sometimes. Sometimes a reverse address will turn up a different number. Just recently this happened, and I called the different number and found out that they had not placed the order (it was being delivered to a different address).

Once in a while, if I feel really unsure about a charge but it is a goodly amount, I will do a Google search for the person's name or their email address. It is surprising--I almost always find something: posts on forums, for instance, or memberships in organizations. This is how I found out that a large order from Spain was probably bona fide because it was coming from a pharmacist well known there for his compounding pharmacy.

[jsinger]

Seems that 90% of our customers have run in a 5K foot-race at some point in their lives :) You can find their name, time, age and hometown. Anyone faster than I am is probably a cheating liar, tho.

Yeah, we google lots of people

[budgie]

That's great - thanks!

[ispy]

True fraud is overplayed. A lot of chargebacks are dissatisfied customers on various power trips of some kind.