Credit Card fraud from Ghana/Nigeria

some 50 orders every day!

[antirack]

We receive some 50 orders every day from Ghana and Nigeria. No, we are not having a very high order volume at all, that is why this affects a VERY large proportion of our daily orders ;-)

We are until now able to track them down, but they are getting very clever now, using fake addresses/names etc, and shipping to other countries.

Since this is going on for weeks, I am sure this is organized. They opened a few hundred accounts with us in just a few weeks, have a few hundred freemail accounts (as we need an email) and this all is hard work for them.

Any experience with this?

[Mardi_Gras]

There was another thread on this a while back - you may want to check out Crazy_Fool's post - it's #38.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[luckyme]

Yeah, i dont get that many orders, but i do get about 10 fraudulant orders a week from Indonesia. I no longer take orders out of the country.

[ebizpro]

I received an $8000.00 order from Indonesia a few months ago.

A call to the credit card issuer confirmed that the card was issued in the U.S., and an email to the "buyer" confirmed that he wasn't traveling abroad :-)

Best Regards,
Marty Foley ~ ProfitInfo.com

[jsinger]

Never ship to Indonesia or Nigeria. Period! It's so simple.

Wal-Mart doesn't; why would you?

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It's not like I can't afford to lose some money. A guy in Lagos is cutting me in for 30% of $58 million next week.

[gsx]

Log their IP address. If you see a pattern in the first few numbers, block them either entirely from your site or force the credit card to always report a declined transaction, if your merchant can allow you to do this. They will get sick of trying and move onto someone else.

I use pre-auth and simply ignore such orders, but if a pattern builds I do what I can to move them on.

[gsx]

And...if you use an authorising company such as WorldPay, make sure you go to Pre-Auth. This means you have to process every order manually (or they cancel it). But if you allow them to process the order (complete the credit card transaction), you will need to refund the card to avoid a chargeback and you will pay the transaction fees.

Imagine, 50 orders in one day by an average order of $200 is $10000. Say you pay 4% transaction fees means you lose $400 per day ($146000 per year). Do it as soon as possible if you have not already. (Also some charge admin fees, WorldPay charge about $10 for each chargeback, so if you don't refund them you get a chargeback fee of $500 per day, an extra $182500 per year, making a loss of $328500 per year to the credit card firms).

I'm sure you can see the importance of this.