We have been getting a bunch of stolen identity orders this last week. Not that we don't get them all the time, but this week I had a few very persistant "potentia clients" who would not give up.

I have had one individual in particular who must have a ton of people's identities because he was able to give me a new card immediately when I had a problem on one of them. These orders also seem to check out in many of the usual ways that we verify a person's order. He placed a few different orders under different names in the same week.

- The IP resolves to the same city as the address
- They passed Visa's Verified by Visa verification
- He was talking to us on IM at length (which is usually not the case with bad orders)
- He was persistant and kept coming back with all kinds of reasons why he was legitimate.
- He came from different IP's even though I am positive that two separate orders were from the same individual.

However,

- The phone numbers never checked out and were either disconnected or had no answer even though the area code actually often matched the city of the order address.

I just got off the phone with one of the people who's identity he stole and issued a credit for them so that I wouldn' t get a chargeback.

The hosting company that was given on two orders was:

host.servgator.net
servgator

There are a few more that I am skeptical of but I don't want to list their info until I am sure.

Jeff

bad stuff!!

Thanks for the heads up on this Jeff. I'll be on the watchout too. We get our fair share of fraud orders that get blocked at the IP level due to information not matching up, but a phonecall still goes out anyway.

These cyber criminals will never give up it seems. They should have a list of hosts that the scam doesn't work on, and just focus on those that it does

Thanks for the information. That is noted. I assume they make us stronger and stronger instead

Always get a copy of license, CC copy, ID, etc...

Thanks for the heads up Jeff

I have seen both host.servgator.net & servgator floating around (lucky not with us yet) and always thought it looked a tad off.

Anytime a random order comes in, 2-3 back to back like that I am all over it. I have no issues picking up a phone and making a call just to double check.

The only time this happened to us before we could catch it I spent about 40 minutes on the phone explaining to an elderly gentleman what the internet was, what hosting was and how it was possible that someone got his CC, directly him to contact his bank, etc.

Was a horrid deal to end up with (him and myself) but it was taken care of and he was appreciative of the time spent in clearing things up.

Thanks for the letting us all know Jeff.

Thanks for the info.

A good head's up One of the best deterrents of this type of behavior is hosts letting each other know when fraudulent activity flares up!

We always like to use Maxmind to monitor our orders, pretty cheap and affordable. We may require phone verification if the order is a large amount.

Other than that its pretty hard to detect fraud orders.

One thing I do is have my system check the location of the user against the location of the PayPal account and automatically freeze the account pending verification if they differ. I'll request that the customer identify themselves via a photo or scan of their license or passport and go from there. This really does work like a charm with complaints coming only from those customers who were likely fraudulent to begin with.

One of my consulting clients was telling me about how they had a customer try for six months with different credit cards nightly in order to try to get an order through. Why not just give up and try somewhere else.

Zachary, was that customer in particular actually legit or was it perhaps a bot that automatically tried new CC after the previous ones were rejected? Even if it was a non-automated scammer, they must have been pretty desperate to try that hard and if it was a real customer, then I'd be even more shocked as I for one would have gotten frustrated by the 3rd attempt and would have looked elsewhere.

I actually had a similar issue, but after about 10 minutes of trying to explain things I just called the bank and let them know what was going on

Regarding fraudulent orders.. It can be a challenge at times to follow the needed procedures, yet still make it simple for new customers to get setup. I think we can all agree that if you're ever in doubt a (usually quick) phone call can easily resolve it.

We have dealt with our fair share of fraud as well and the only real way to avoid it is to call and verify the person yourself. This will also help you market yourself and ensure to the client that your door is always open for them just in case they ever needed anything.

Also, traffic analyzers work like a charm, half the time I see a suspicious order, I log in to see when they entered their order and notice that a foreign IP was on the exact same page before a US IP would log on to the exact web card ID.

Hopefully these tips help.