Card from strange bank - AVS Match

[cbsteven]

I got an order today that normally I would be 100% sure is fraud. $2000 purchase of an item sold at MSRP, which means you can assuredly find it for cheaper elsewhere. The kind of thing we have listed but never sell.

The billing/shipping address match, and the AVS and CVV code responses came back as a match.

I traced the bank, and it is "Worlds Foremost Bank", run by Cabelas. It seems like a fairly small operation. I called them and they did a voice verification of my information.

Has anyone heard of a scam that looks like this, maybe using a tiny bank without hefty fraud procedures?

[elightbox]

The only similar thing is a customer claiming they did not authorize the purchase. So even though everything matched and it was shipped to the billing address we had a chargeback and lost the appeal, luckily it was a much smaller transaction than yours.
Try talking to the customer directly and go with your gut. It is usually right.

[windycityparrot]

BIN's

What did the BIN number tell you? - anyone can have a private label credit card

[cbsteven]

The BIN said issued by World's Foremost Bank. I would have been on the fence about the transaction even if it had been a mega-bank, with the item in question and the guy calling via skype and sounding a bit suspicious on the phone, but the fact that it was a bank I've never heard of was one too many red flags.

[windycityparrot]

BIN's

Kudos to you for paying your due diligence. We had a guy who's counterfeiting credit cards offshore and apparently using us to "test the cards" - using this one particular birdcage which was in the low to hundreds so it didn't raise any eyebrows.

We started getting calls from people who said "I didn't order no stinking birdcage" and put an end to that. At the time I reached out to the Secret Service - they just chuckled.

[elightbox]

Yes, this kind of fraud is very low risk, and high reward. When we had our retail store we had so many bad checks and the police could not give a hoot.
Makes you wonder if it is a more profitable business than what we are doing.

[thecartdesigner]

What was the shipping selection? A company I worked for long ago would collect a CC verification fax if the order was over a certain amount (Usually $500+) and the shipping was 2nd day air or next day air (dead give away for fraud when nothing seems right). Anyway I don't know what applies now for regulations but they had 2 boxes on the form to be faxed, one for ID image and one for CC image. It was like the fraud version of Raid Bug Killer. Killed Fraud Dead.

Again this was many years ago now, so I have no idea if that process would even be allowed any longer. Might be worth checking out.

[cbsteven]

One of my go-to methods is to email the buyer and ask them to email me a picture of the front of their credit card, and sometimes I also ask them to include their photo ID in the picture. Usually I do this for international customers where AVS verification doesn't work.

[DeanP]

One of my go-to methods is to email the buyer and ask them to email me a picture of the front of their credit card.

I really don't like this method. If someone found a wallet on the ground then it just proves that they did so, and only offers a false sense of security for store owners. Plus there's, truthfully, countless articles and rants and reviews around the web from angry consumers who are freaked at the idea of a company asking for their personally identifiable information (two of which I've written), as well as potentially some PCI compliance issues.

This honestly sounds like a safe transaction to me. A customer calling in on Skype after failing to do his research on pricing doesn't mean that it's fraud, it just means that's he's also the type of guy who probably goes to Best Buy to overpay for everything. ;) I don't know how you're getting a go on AVS from what sounds like an Australian bank, but so long as everything is a match and you're shipping to the billing address, I'd do it. Just make sure the BA isn't a freight forwarder, or mailbox center, or building that burned down last week.

[cbsteven]

I disagree on almost all of your points.

A high value international transaction has almost zero way for the seller to be assured of its legitimacy. AVS checking doesn't exist for most foreign banks. Sometimes you can call the bank and find an English-speaking person to verify the information, but I've tried it before and it is very hard to do.

If you ask them to email you a picture of their credit card and photo ID, then you can be reasonably assured that you are shipping to the address of the owner of the credit card. Also, a fraudster generally would not go through the step of supplying this information.

This is not something I do regularly, only in high value international cases that throw enough red flags that I'm not confident about. It may cause PCI Compliance issues, but it'd be a drop in the bucket of the compliance issues that most places are dealing with.


As for my specific transaction in question, I'm not sure why you say it sounds like an Australian bank. I've been doing this for a long time, and everything about it screams fraud to me. Just a type of fraud I might not have seen before.

Our site is the site you go to because you searched on Google and we were the best price. There is no way this guy found this $2000 item on our site before other sites selling it for hundreds of dollars less.

I ended up canceling the guys transaction.

[elightbox]

One method that we utilize on a regular basis is undercharging the card by 10 cents to a dollar, and ask the customer to check their on-line statement, or call their customer service to verify the amount we charged in US dollars.
Most likely if they can do that, then they are the owner of the card.

I have had a few transactions where no one would ever reply, and some that seem completely confused, but the majority can do this simple task.

[DeanP]

Have you considered segmenting your payment options so that only PayPal is available to certain international customers? That way you can have some seller protection and know if you're shipping to an address that has been verified, at least, by Paypal.

[cbsteven]

New kind of delivery fraud

EDIT: Accidental post, meant to start a new thread