| LED Digest 1523: More on Fraud Prevention |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest ................................................. February 21, 2003 Issue #1523 ................................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== International Fraud Protection ==-- ~ Martyn Gay "Our problems are increased because we ship our product...electronically by email..." ~ W. Chen "We have stopped accepting foreign credit cards." --== Copyright Notices ==-- ~ Ivan J. Jimenez "Not too long ago we did a survey about this..." ~ Steve Knilans "...not all languages use the Latin characterset." ===== GEEK TIPS ================== --== Space Around Forms ==-- ~ Anne McKay ~ Stephen Mareches ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Web Statistics Software ==-- ~ D. Diehl ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Martyn Gay Subject: Fraud protection > It is a first world country but yet Godaddy.com chooses > to treat the credit card from Singapore like some third > rate centre. - Vincent Tan, LED 1517 > In these past 2 1/2 years, we have experienced well over > US $41,000 in "attempted" fraudulent orders which > represents nearly 20% of our total sales. If we accepted > credit cards through an automated approval system like > GoDaddy appears to use, we would probably have lost our > merchant account due to chargebacks - Ronald L Coble, LED 1521 I sympathise both Ronald and Vincent. The fact is that the far east is a major source of attempted fraud for us and therefore transactions from there will always require a closer look (though we have had a low percentage of fraudulent orders from Singapore). Our problems are increased because we ship our product (shopping cart software) electronically by email - fraudsters love this because they can sit in an internet cafe in Indonesia with stolen card details and pretend to be a customer in the UK or USA. We can't tell where we are shipping it to by looking at their email address. We do the following: 1) Check the IP address. Ensure your developer / software includes these in the order and learn how to look them up. If the IP address doesn't match with the purchaser's claimed billing address, you've probably got a fraud. 2) We don't ship to free mail addresses. We insist people use an email address linked to a domain that we trust, eg their company or university email address. 3) What have they ordered? Many fraudsters like to order as much as they possibly can (hey, someone else is paying). Our order form has a box for "other amount" which customers can use to enter an amount for paying one of our invoices for custom development etc. Many of the fraudsters not only order everything on our form, they even generously put a few thousand pounds through as an "other payment". A sure sign of fraud. Once we have identified a transaction as suspicious we may elect to call the phone number. Hardly any fraudsters will use their real phone number. In the worst case we insist on payment by wire before shipping. Also worth noting is that our level of attempted fraud greatly reduced from around 20% of orders, to virtually zero when we switched from using encrypted email (processed offline) to using an online gateway ( www.worldpay.com ). We have setup Worldpay to take the orders in realtime, but not charge the card until we give the okay. This enables us to check each order before despatching the software. Other gateways provide similar facilities. I appreciate Vincent's views - it must be irritating (and even insulting) for honest customers to face inconvenience just because some people in their region choose to make a living from fraud. We've been guilty of seeing an order from Indonesia and instantly assuming it to be fraud because the 100 previous ones from there were (it turned out to be real). On a brighter note, the credit card companies will soon be introducing a system where you will have to use a PIN number when you order online. This must surely inflict a massive blow against the fraudsters. Martyn Gay ASP Shopping Cart Software www.cactushop.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: W. Chen Subject: Fraud protection This sure is a topic that is seldom addressed in LED Digest. We reported our African credit card fraud cases that we encountered at the Secret Services and found out we are not alone. We have stopped accepting foreign credit cards. We wonder why nobody addresses this issue until now. This is not a discrimination against foreign buyers. There are just too many fraudulent Internet cases around from foreign buyers (even using stolen US credit cards to buy and to ship overseas.) W. Chen collectrarestuff.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Ivan J. Jimenez Subject: Copyright > ... wouldn't it be easier to put a last updated date > on the page if you are worried that the visitor viewing > the page might think that the page is from 2001? - Vicki Lambert, LED 1521 Vicki has a great idea but I'm afraid it won't act favorably to all sites. For example, if you've got some articles that read just as true today as they were three years ago, marking your site with 'updated 2/18/99' may deter prospective visitors. Not too long ago we did a survey about this and found that readers DO want to ensure that the information they're looking at IS current however they don't much care WHEN it was written (I hope that wasn't too confusing). Here's what they wanted: - A current site that's frequently updated / revised - Affirmation that articles and resources deal with TODAY'S issues After learning this, we decided to add a simple function to our site that automatically updates our main navigational bar with today's date and our articles are preceded with: "These helpful articles are changed periodically. There is no time frame, we just post a new article whenever we see something worth mentioning. That said, we highly recommend printing the article so you can go back to it for future reference." The above does a few things... First it utilizes our sense of urgency while calling you to action. Second, it adds value to the information presented. Third and most importantly, it lets the reader know that he or she is about to see something that can help him or her today. Even if we added 'written on 9/17/01', the reader will know that this info is still current (however, if we did add a 'written on' date, we'd mention that the info is just as valuable today as it was on 9/17/01). To see this in action, visit: http://CosmicBreath.com/DynaLink/article/74/article.asp All the best, Ivan J. Jimenez, Business Development CosmicBreath.com Marketing Group ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Steve Knilans Subject: Copyright > Why the ellipse (...) and not a dash (-) between the > years? Because the dash... can be interpreted as > a minus sign... - Heikki Nylund, LED 1522 The (-) can NEVER be interpreted as a minus sign in this context. It is recognized as a range! The elipses is not a recognized part of the statement, and people may wonder what you mean. The elipses is usually used to represent one or more missing ELEMENTS of a range (not allowed for copyrights), or an implied infinite continuation (ALSO not allowed). Remember, that not all languages use the Latin characterset. Also, there is a group of lobotomized (at least in the U.S.) people that must "understand" your statements. They are known as Lawyers. I say lobotimized, because lawyers develop loquacious and misleading lengthy diatribe and certain formats, and INSIST that nonconforming language or formats can't be understood. They may end up finding that your way of doing things is not valid. (If it suits them, or their clients, they ****WILL****) Bear in mind that things are setup such that a court case could be costly and lengthy. BTW, 1999,2001-2003 means that part of the document is copyright 1999, and other parts are copyright 2001, 2002, 2003. The U.S. wants the registered copy to clearly outline when a given part was copyright. Steve Knilans ===== GEEK TIPS =================================== From: Anne McKay Subject: Form space > When you make a form, it seems to force some space > around itself on the page... when your form is an image > or button, any surrounding text is forced away... - Phil Chave, LED 1521 Hi Phil, A fix to this issue is to put the form tags outside of whatever tags you are working in. Yes, it's "sub-standard" HTML but it does the job and won't break anything. As an example: <.form> <.table> <.tr> <.td><.input type="text" name="blah"><./td> <./tr> <./table> <./form> Hope this helps :-) Anne McKay Divinity Design ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Stephen Mareches Subject: Form space Phil: I remember going through the same stuff. Make sure there aren't <.p> and <./p> tags around your form. I know FrontPage 2000 likes to stick these little guys in there, so that no matter what you do you have a good deal of white space around your form. Stephen Mareches, Web Consultant Sophia Solutions www.sophiasolutions.net ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: D. Diehl Subject: Web Statistics Software Hello LED'ers, I've been reading all of the digests with great interest as I am a novice and greatly appreciate all the useful tips. I was hoping if someone could please give me some advice or direction as to where I can find a good web statistics software. I've searched the internet and I have not had much luck. I am not looking for a monthly subscription based on page views but rather a software that I can purchase and load on the server to use. Any responses would be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance! D. Diehl ------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1995-2003 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- |
