Hi folks,
I will be going against my usual personal rule and posting this same message on many boards tonite (so please forgive in advance).
Many of you may or may not know that my new website,The Ultimate Marketers Resource has been available for the past two months. We are doing quite well and many customers are very satisfied. However, the other day I received a strange notice from my merchant provider: a chargeback.
The chargeback had me confused, considering I have never had one before. Customers who wanted a refund in the past merely had to ask and they were granted one without questions (except for how we could improve our products to avoid this in the future).
Anyway, the notice came with nothing other than a card number to indicate who requested the money back. When I did some research, I tied out the order to someone who claimed to be in Australia (nothing odd there, I have many good customers and friends down under). However, the person had used a strange phone number (the ten digit US standard) and had put CA under the state category.
I realized that someone had ordered from me using a stolen credit card and the reason for the chargeback was plain as day.
Not satisfied to simply lose this money, the first thing we did was remove the persons access to the site (as the UMR is a members only site). I still had no idea who I was dealing with.
Luckily my affiliate software records the IP address of the individual who orders at the time of their transaction, so I had that to go on.
I ran a tracert on the IP address and came up with a Canadian ISP. This gets curiouser and curiouser. Not only did the person use a stolen card, they tried to throw me off their trail by using an Australian address. This is a common practice among these credit card thieves I have discovered.
I am close to tracking this person down and when I find them, they will get reported to the proper authorities. Thanks to technology.
Point being: be careful who you do business with. Make sure your merchant provider uses AVS (address verification service) on your credit card processing and install some tracking mechanisms to record who is on your site and what they are doing. (If anyone needs any recommendation of scripts to do this, ask here so all can benefit or email me and I will let you know). You should also pay close attention to your orders when they come in, if anything seems out of the ordinary, keep a close eye on things, don't go crazy and accuse people of stealing, just keep a watchful eye open at all times.
I hope this has been helpful to all.
Success,
Marc Goldman
The Ultimate Marketers Resource