When these fraudsters use mail forwarding services, do they have the address registered with the credit card company, and do you guys check that?
I ask because I live overseas and use a forwarding service quite a bit, but several smaller shops do flat refuse to ship to me, meaning I have to ship to my dad's and have him send it to my forwarding service, which ups the price a bit. And it's kinda frustrating, as I do have the address registered with my banks.
At least reading a story like this one explains to me a bit why things are the way they are.
They usually don't since they may not have the bank login information or be able to pass the bank's verification checks in order to change the registered info. Even if they do, merchants many times won't check because its very time consuming to call up the bank to verify shipping address.
Thats unfortunate that it causes you the hassle. But from the merchant's perspective, especially if they have been burned before, ship forwarding services are high risk.
Look at it this way. When you place your order, to the merchant, your IP will be from overseas, the credit card will be based in the US, and you are shipping to a ship forwarding facility. This is very typical of what fraud looks like with stolen US cards. The problem is that merchants bear the responsibility and chargebacks are a big problem, so they may not want to take the risk.
Banks often approve transactions where the billing address doesn't match - this is because the financial burden of the fraud is borne by the merchant.
But the response does indicate whether the numeric portion of the street address matched and whether the zip matched. The merchant can choose to reject the order based on this information. In our case, we accept the order if either matches.
Many merchants also are looking at the IP location from which the order was placed. Depending on the country it may raise enough red flags to reject the order.
as someone outside the usa can i (1) thank you for selling outside and (2) ask what we can do to help avoid fraud / re-assure sellers when we are legitimate buyers?
i recently bought something and first emailed the shop asking if it was ok, pointing them to my online existence (blog etc). i don't really know if it helped (but they shipped - according to fedex the box arrived in santiago at 3am this morning - may be here today :o).
i don't use a shipping service, but was wondering about doing so (because they have clearer fees - dhl at least, in my experience, adds random extra "customs charges"). i guess i should not bother trying that.
i use a "virtual credit card" (a one-off for internet use, generated by my bank's web page, with an upper limit that matches the price, short expiration date, and valid only for single use). i feel pretty safe using that, but i guess that just protects me, not the seller (although if you can tell someone is using one then i guess it is not a stolen card). recently i have started adding my postcode to shipping details (they exist in chile, but most people don't use them and it doesn't appear on my credit card bill). i do always ship to my billing address.
i don't know what else i can do. i really appreciate companies that do ship - the internal market here in chile is limited, so this is pretty much the only way to indulge when i want something unusual.
[one positive note - a chinese company called audiogd that makes electronics (hifi dac) gave really excellent service, letting me disassemble their hardware and return only a single logic board that was faulty, rather than the entire (heavy, expensive to ship) product. i wish there were some way to reward companies like that. http://www.audio-gd.com/En%20audio-gd.htm ]
