Credit card fraud has raised to an alarming rate over the last few years. According to Master Card credit card fraud has increased by 369% since 1995. It is one of the harder frauds to fight and since there is no face to face interaction or voice to voice over the internet it is one of the more popular forms of fraud, giving the criminals a greater sense of comfort.

There is more then one way that a credit card can be used illegally on your internet website. It could be a boy or girl stealing a parents credit card, a lost or taken card that has not yet been reported to the company, or the identity theft scam, where a card has been ordered under someone elses identity and information. You have to be able to guard yourself and your business from this fraud, because the credit card companies will hold you fully responsible for the transaction.

Which means you not only lost your product, but the cost of sale and in some cases finds an additional $40 charge back fee. You can even be black listed from your merchant account and have it closed if you have too many charge backs. So what is it that we can do about online credit card fraud?

There is a few ways that you can check if the person is a real card holder. First you can verify the customers billing address. This can be done automatically by the Address Verification System.

This will be able to check that the billing address matches the information the company has with the card. But this only works for address within the United States. Another problem with verifying the billing address is that the internet allows us to purchase products electronically and also delivered electronically for example movies, software, e-books, and etc.

Another thing that you will have to watch out for when verifying the address is that the AVS System provides no protection at all if the person that stole the card obtains a valid address that goes along with the stolen credit card. The next way that you can check if it is a order is to be careful of purchases from a free email address like hotmail.com and yahoo.com.

The purpose behind them getting a free email address is that they are impossible to trace. If the customer has a paid email address a good thing to do is to check their website. All you have to do for this is to put a www in front of the part after the @ of the email address for example if someone has an email address that is HYPERLINK "mailto:joe@mywebsite.com" joe@myownwebsite.com just put in HYPERLINK "http://www.mywebsite.com" www.myownwebsite.com and check if the contact information on the site matches the information on the billing address.

Another thing you can do is tell your visitors of all of you anti-fraud systems that you have in place even if they are not there. This will deter most thieves just by warning. It is the same concept of somebody putting a home security system signs in their lawn and not having a security system in the home.

There is no way for the thief to tell if they are in place or not; they prefer easier targets. Lastly beware of international orders - orders from the Middle East, Egypt, and others have some of the highest fraudulent rates.