FraudSmack is a web service that you can call from your shopping cart code to check the
potential risk of the sale prior to processing the credit card.
The goal is to stop the vast majority of credit card fraud before you process the
card and ship the goods or create a customer account.
If your business has been the victim of credit card fraud, then you are aware that when you accept a stolen credit card, that the bank and credit card processors expect you, the merchant, to cover the cost of all losses, including the cost of the sale, a charge back fee (generally around $25.00), double transaction fees (yes, they charge you again when they reverse the charge), and you are out the cost of the goods you've shipped, and the internal costs of delivering the goods. These costs can quickly put you out of business if you don't have an effective means of preventing fraudulent transactions.
Effectiveness
The only way you will stop 100% of credit card fraud is to stop accepting credit cards. FraudSmack
is very effective at reducing credit card fraud. It has been in use at Aquest Hosting since January 2006 and we have
reduced fraud by 95%. With only a 5% false postive result, FraudSmack has eased our work-load
and cut overhead costs, and of course increased our net profits tremendously. Your results may vary due to the
unique nature of every business, fraudster, and custom settings you may create in FraudSmack.
What has to be done to start using FraudSmack?
- Create your account with FraudSmack.
- Set up FraudSmack's parameters:
FraudSmack is setup with default parameters so that you can begin to use it immediately. We have already setup FraudSmack to watch for the major free email domains, the major central ISP's, and have setup the scoring system.
- Setting up your code to call the FraudSmack web service:
If you have ever called a web service from your code, then you know that it is a very simple procedure. We do provide sample code to help you get started.
Using FraudSmack
Your code will make a call to the FraudSmack web service passing in information about your potential customer including: IP address, credit card billing address, email address, credit card last 4 digits, and credit card expiration date. FraudSmack then creates a series of risk factors based on the input information. Each risk factor will either have a point value, a blacklisting, or a whitelisting. An overall
point value for the transaction will be determined. If the point value is low, the sale has a low risk of being fraud. If the point value is high, the sale has a high risk of being fraud.
If any of the risk factors are blacklisted, the sale will be denied. If any of the risk factors are whitelisted, the sale will be accepted. There are 3 expected result
values (ACCEPT, WARN, DENY), and you can set the 2 point levels that trigger these values. When you first sign up, these will be set at the values that we've found to work best in our testing, but we want you to be able to adjust these as your needs may vary from ours. Unlike some other systems, FraudSmack was designed to be completely adjustable to your needs, not ours. This flexibility makes FraudSmack
incredibly potent against credit card fraud and the associated chargeback fees.