Forum Moderators: buckworks
Any of you fallen victim to INTERNATIONAL fraud?
Would you care to share your story so that we may all learn from that.
Would like to know what country was involved and how they went about it etc?
I hope this is not too personal but I would really like to know since I deal a lot with International customers.
Thank you very much!
Sas
Notified by credit card company several days later charge was bad.
Tried to stop shipment but product was already delivered. I lost inventory, ate cost of FedEx, and gained chargeback fee. Newbie mistake. Lesson learned. Story can be repeated for countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Eastern Europe, Africa, etc. I still ship international, but I verify information now on big purchases. If they use a hotmail.com to purchase weary ;)
Check to see that the they have not tagged a country dodgy city name in one the end, to fool the AVS system.
Do a search on this site for security with CC payments there is a mind of information
Hope this helps
Also sun818 did that Tahi order pay with a thai CC? Or was it a stolen American one? Do you know?
Sas
Has anyone come across fraud where they used a stolen credit card that was stolen in the country of where they want shipment sent to?
Sas
The Nigerians are the most persistent and they actually make me laugh now because they will try ANYTHING to get their order through. Although invariably they always give their delivery phone number with the Nigerian country code, even when they give addresses anywhere from Dublin to the USA.
My all-time favourite was one from Morocco, who gave his billing address as Alfred Joker, London Street Number 85, London, and then a Moroccon postcode.
One thing to look out for is mail-drop boxes. I've had orders from fraudsters based in Africa and the Middle-East using the address of a mail-drop box company in Florida, which looks perfectly genuine at first glance. This company seems to specialise in deliberately flogging these 'fake' addresses to overseas customers, who then get all their mail forwarded on to them. I'm sure there are plenty of other mail-drop box companies out there doing the same thing. If I am at all suspicious of an address I will actually type it into Google and see what comes up, it can sometimes be very enlightening!
[edited by: Rubylily at 1:36 pm (utc) on Nov. 6, 2003]
USA
UK
Spain
Thailand
Philipines
Israel
Malaysia
Thailand
Macedonia
Columbia
We have had attempted frauds from the following countries
Indonesia
Nigeria
Ghana
Sierra Leone
Russia
Serbia and Montenegro
Romania
Bulgaria
Costa Rica
Peru
Singapore
Vietnam
Turkey
Iran
France
Belgium
Morocco
Hong Kong (probably from a traveller)
Looking back at our records, we could have prevented all but one that resulted in chargebacks. However, we shipped them because we were covered by a guarrantee against chargebacks. You must strike a balance between shipping to a fraudster or insulting and losing a genuine customer.
how could you have prevented them - what were the 'tell-tale' signs re these orders that would have caused you to have grave suspicions?
Regards,
Mr Bo Jangles
For me they are fairly easy to spot. For example, they will often order 10 of one item (which none of my legitimate customers would ever do - I don't sell wholesale), or they will choose the most expensive items in the store and run up a huge bill totalling a couple of £K, when my average order is only around £100 or so. The delivery country is usually a dead giveaway anyway. AVS results are also an obvious giveaway (the country of issue for the card rarely ever matches the delivery country and the CVV results rarely match either), and often you will find that the cardholder turns out to be someone like Mrs Mary Davies from Virginia and the yet the delivery address is someone in Lagos.
Its really a gut check though, you can't just apply the above like a check list. You know what a usual order is like, the type of people who tend to buy your product, and the questions they ask and the assurances they want. Anything out of the ordinary will stick out to you.
If you are unsure about an order, a good technique is to suggest that due to stocking issues you can't get product X but can get product Y, where Y is an expensive, easy to resell product but quite a bit different to X (or possibly much more expensive). If they don't mind then they are almost certainlly a fraud. This works much better if you can phone them - since if you decide they are genuine you can quickly backtrack and sell the original product. Over email maybe you could just suggest a week or two lead time, which hopefully wouldn't scare of to many genuine buyers.
We only moved merchants after our merchant seemed not to care. It seemed that we were making money out of someone else's scam, as some transaction were bound to go unnoticed. We tried to tell the UK police, the FBI, the credit card company... but nobody cared!
It was outrageous.
I received an operator assisted "phone call" where the operator was receiving a typed message and would read the message to me and I would have to respond for her to type back in.
10 minutes into this "conversation", I mentioned that we did have resources to cover the request but shipping would be excessive. The reply was "No problem".
I asked if they had access to a computer and email and requested an email to confirm the order. They said yes and emailed 5 minutes later. Red flags all OVER the place. Since they already had my products/services picked out....why the phone operator? Why not direct email all of this dialogue? What is the direct contact info? Who are the principles of the company? When can I talk to them?
I'm glad to say that the suspicions were correct and we prevented all 3 incidents. On ALL international orders, we absolutely require wired funds up front and faxed, signed documents. When you have a large order in front of you worth Thousands of dollars, it is hard not to get rather motivated to close this "sale". However, it is imperative to stick to a protocol that protects you and never waiver from that protocol. Your requirements for verification, payment and signatures are very valid - from any customer.
Good luck out there and hope many legitimate large orders come your way.
We tried to tell the UK police
Therefore country profiling probably forms the most important part of the screening process.
Last year we had a funny one:
A staff of Reuters Singapore booked the Oriental Hotel (kingsize bed) and showed his passport at check-in.
After paying us about 1600 USD in the transaction he dicided to charge back this amount from his Amex card.
We caught the bugger as he had to show his passport at check-in. It was also funny as he had a Thai woman with him in the room and what I heard lately is that his wife in Singapore divorced him already and he is now in jail for fraught.
BTW: We have on average 2-3 transactions per week with scams. They are mostly from African and Asian nationals. If you get an order from a Thai you can be assured that the credit card will have problems by charge back.
More info here [commidea.com]
Apologies if this is promoting as i do work for the company but i also run an online shop (hence my membership here) and know this is something i will be going for myself as a webmaster.
I once had a member of staff buy some gear in the shop on dodgy card while I was out, anyway when the police turned up they werent really interested in the the card fraud or fact that she had nicked £60 from the till.
Butttttt the fact she'd lied on her CV!
very hard to keep a straight face.
the only problem is that we decline a large number of international countries and we have writen custome code to retry these in a different mannor.
we used to eye ball orders, but no longer, everything is automatted and at a very acceptable level.
Fraud is pretty easy to see now… after getting hosed for a few 1,000
1)Multiple units of fairly expensive items
2)Fast Shipping required
3)Destination. Some areas of the globe are just plan off limits
4)Redirects. Take a look at the country it is shipping to & then confirm that the city is in that country. Even if UPS or FedEx calls before the redirect, your product is already out there and you have incurred major duty & shipping
For the record we have had zero fraud for orders shipped to:
USA
Canada
Mexico
New Zealand
Australia (Unless it’s a redirect to Indonesia)
Singapore (I bet that canning hurts)
Japan
England
Ireland
Scotland
Switzerland
Spain
Israel
United Arab Emirates
Germany
Sweden
Italy
Columbia
We now have a lunchroom game for fun. We try and drive the scammer insane..
Currently, we have a $700 dollar order for Norway, which would be redirected to Nigeria on our fun board. It had 2 Day shipping for $200. We have received the AT&T Text call from our boy stating the credit card had cleared. So we sent him an e-mail letting him know we shipped his product to Norway. (Of course we have not). We expect contact on Monday wanting to know where the goods are now. So we plan on giving a bogus tracking number. After, that we plan on telling him it was signed for, and then maybe tell him we reshipped it…etc etc etc Meanwhile we post all the correspondence for the staff, kinda like a soap opera.
Might sound a little childish, but the biggest part of the fraud problem is laziness.
If this is your money and it looked even a bit odd you could call the customer and if you still don’t feel comfortable ask them to wire or western Union Funds and pick up the tab.
Try this one, tell them that the delivery was refused and you require another $XX.XX to reship have them wire it via Western union.
Nice to make a small profit from their crooked behaviour.
I am curious-who is the guaranteeing entity? We have several e-commerce sites and have done over 35,000 transactions all together. Chargebacks represent a little less than 1 percent-I am not sure if that is good or not. We always fight the chargeback and win 50% of the time, however we eat the lost amount the other 50%. Who guarantees this for you, your processor or the clearinghouse? I sure would like to talk to that comapny.
For others- We manually look at all orders and manually ask for more information for "suspicious" orders. "Suspisious" means a larger than normal order to a foreign country.
ALSO, SEVERAL MONTHS AGO WE BEGAN REFUSING ALL ORDERS TO NIGERIA. It seemed that virtually every order shipped to NIGERIA was charged back.
We also also do this for Russia soon.
Hope that helps. While on this subject-does anyone know of a check paying program where the money actually comes out of the account IMMEDIATELY? We stopped accepting online checks as there were too many "authorized" accounts that had no money in them 5-7 days later. Just wondering if things have changed for the better since 2002.
-BDK
davidk, EVERY credit card order from Nigeria is a fraud. I'll repeat - EVERY ORDER FROM NIGERIA FOR PAYMENT WITH A DEBIT OR CREDIT CARD IS A FRAUD.
This is not that there are no honest people in Nigeria. I have family who've been working in the oil industry there for many years and they are as honest as the day is long. But the honest people realise that no business will accept their credit cards for a "customer not present" transaction if they are based in Nigeria. So the people in Nigeria who do have genuine credit cards DON'T use them for internet orders. They have another reason not to, when you live in Nigeria for long enough you become very, very cagey as to where you use your card for fear of someone nicking the details. The last thing they'd do is use the card on something as insecure - for them - as the internet.
That leaves only the ones with stolen cards who attempt to place orders on the net.
In addition to the methods mentioned above. There are other ways of checking international orders
1. Look up the person in a local telephone directory and see whether the information matches.
2. Look at the domain of the e-mail address and see whether it belongs to a real company, rather than a fake company with a one page web site. You can also try contacting the person through the main telephone no. of the company.
3. Make a search using the person's name and/or address and/or telephone no. through Google. This will often throw up information on the person, in particular for US addresses.
4. Make a search using the person's e-mail using Google. You will be surprised how often you can find information about this person as they leave a trail through forums and message boards.
5. When the person communicates to you, you can do a reverse ip check on his e-mail address to see whether it orginated from.
Kunle
>> Not all Nigerians are fraudulent
Absolutely. Even the worst detractors in this thread have acknowledged that. Nor is Nigeria the only country to suffer higher than average fraud rates. Many US based ecommerce sites recieve the numerically largest number of fraud and fraud attempts from within the US for instance, due simply to the larger scale of the internet and credit card use in the US, although the highest proportion of fraud attempts on a frauds / order volume basis may come from elsewhere
It is an unfortunate fact that many fraudlent orders do seem to originate in Nigeria, and it has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the countries that attract instant suspicion when any order originates from it. However, diligent, honest merchants will always check out a potential order, and if a Nigerian individual or firm wishes to make an interent purchase, and can satisfy the merchant of their genuine intent and ability to pay, any order will be honoured. It is also generally true that these same merchants will treat any suspected fraudulent order the same regardless of the country of origin
I personally would very interested to hear more about steps being taken in Nigeria to combat this undoubted problem. A G search [google.com] has thrown up some fascinating information on the EFCC, its history and record, and I would urge all e-commerce site owners, consultants etc to spend some time reviewing the information found
[edited by: TallTroll at 11:56 am (utc) on Nov. 12, 2003]
I am one Nigerian that feels strongly about this issue.
I am a Director in a foremost e-commerce company in Nigeria. We've been trying over the years to provide a genuine online payment solution for Nigerians wishing to purchase things online (domain names, webhosting, clothes, shoes, school applications and transactions generally etc) but we've had problems because some sites would not even accept payments from Nigerians at all. Not to talk of verify.
We have a licence from a US company to provide virtual cards for Nigerians to transact online. If you want details of this I can send it anytime.
So why should Nigerians be victimised and why all this prejudice?
It is pathetic and sad that A place that has such business potentials (120 Million Individuals) should be left out of the happenings in the world of ecommerce just because of some few bad eggs which are present in other counries too I can bet, but do not get the kind of cheap publicity those of Nigerians have. It is absolutely sad.
Nigeria is really moving forward. With the advent of Telecommunications boom(Nigeria is the Largest growing telecommunications market in Africa). I beleive its a matter of time before we reach there. Ecommerce is already starting in Nigeria too and soon you hear all about it.
I believe in Nigeria. I believe in Myself and I believe in Isotope Consulting
Thanks
[edited by: TallTroll at 11:48 am (utc) on Nov. 12, 2003]
[edit reason] tidy up [/edit]
