Did you know? Electronic payment fraud costs merchants millions of dollars every year. What are you doing to protect your profit margins? The minimal costs of adding a fraud protection service to your transactions will easily pay for themselves in chargebacks prevented.
The card associations and check processors place the liability on the merchant to ensure that the transaction is legitimate. If a transaction is fraudulent, the merchant will take a loss on (A) the cost of the goods/service provided to the “customer,” (B) the FULL charged-back transaction amount that will be debited out of your checking account, and (C) a chargeback penalty from your processor, usually $25-30. In addition, if you have more than 1% of your sales resulting in chargebacks (1 out of 100 sales or $1 per $100 in sales), your merchant account can be terminated, potentially forcing the merchant out of business. You may be placed on the TMF list as well, preventing you from acquiring another merchant account, there are no second chances. As unfair as this may seem, it is the reality a merchant must face when accepting electronic payments. Visa/MC/AmEx/Discover all extend to their card holders 6 months to issue a chargeback, and ACH customers also have 6 months to issue a dispute.
A merchant needs to realize that the rules are in place to protect customers from the fraudulent use of their credit card & checking account, and *NOT* to protect the merchant from fraudulent customers! The merchant must both (A) protect themselves from fraudulent transactions and (B) protect themselves from “friendly fraud.” Friendly fraud is where the customer tries to take advantage of the chargeback protection afforded to them, even when the merchant *did* deliver the product or service to the customer.
We offer the following Fraud Protection services to help maximize the profits and confidence of our merchants:
 |
Verified by Visa & MasterCard SecureCode: This service is offered directly from Visa & Mastercard through our gateway to reduce online fraud; it will help protect the merchant from chargebacks for “FRAUD” codes, which are the most common type of chargebacks with card not present transactions. |
 |
Fraud Scrubbing: This service can be used in conjunction with Verified by Visa and SecureCode, or by itself. Use our gateway’s internal fraud scrubbing engine, as well as your own rule-sets to monitor and prevent fraudulent transactions. |
 |
dCheck Demand Draft: Use our Check21 processing solution for online transactions instead of eCheck and ACH. With eCheck and ACH, customers have 6 months to issue a simple dispute/chargeback. With Check21 processing, after 10 days, the burden of proof is on the customer to prove that fraud occurred, and the regulations are designed to protect the merchant from fraudulent customers. |