Boston, MA, November 28, 2005–As E-tailers prepare for the year’s busiest shopping season starting Cyber Monday, MaxMind offers seven tips for merchants to verify and prevent fraud from online credit card transactions.

1. Perform Address Verification Service (AVS) and Card Verification Value (CVV) checks. If the order passes both checks, accept the order for further processing but do not capture the credit card charge. Instead, select the “Authorization/Pending Capture” mode because fraudsters can easily obtain information to pass these checks. Failing the CVV check indicates that the purchaser may not be in possession of the actual card. Orders that fail the AVS check should be processed with more caution.
2. Lookup the customer’s IP address with a geolocation service provider that also detects anonymous proxies. In most cases, the general geographical location of the IP address should match either the billing or shipping address. Orders from anonymous proxies are considered to have higher risks because fraudsters often use anonymous proxies to hide their true IP addresses.
3. Check the geographical location of the IP address against known high-risk countries such as Egypt, Ghana, Indonesia, Lebanon, Macedonia, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Ukraine, and Vietnam.
4. Check if the goods will be shipped to a mail-forwarding company when the shipping and billing address are different. An order with a mail-forward address is considered risky since the goods may be shipped overseas.
5. Ensure that the provided zip code corresponds to the city and state fields for both billing and shipping address. AVS only checks the zip code and the numeric portion of the street address. Fraudsters may not always have the complete address and may be too lazy do a zip code reverse lookup for additional information.
6. Request that the customer fax a signed authorization form with copies of the front and back of the credit card if the order is suspicious. This is usually fairly effective but fraudsters have been known to be able to create images of the front and back of credit cards using graphic design software.
7. Ask the customer to provide the bank name and customer service phone number as listed on the credit card. Call customer service to verify if the given phone number matches records for the cardholder. If it matches, call the customer to authorize the transaction. If they are unaware of the purchase, suggest that they call the credit card company and report the card as stolen. This is one of the most effective methods, but is time-consuming.

Source: MaxMind

AMEX ad

On some client work for a client I have been helping them turn this animation into an animated gif from it’s flash form.  To get the smooth animation in Flash we first turned the fps (frames per second) up to 31, then I exported each frame by exporting the movie as a jpeg sequence.  Then I also exported the animated gif from flash, (but didn’t get the a very clean picture). So I replaced each frame in the animated gif with the exported jpeg frame, then customized the palate to really keep clean the important pieces.  Also, Fireworks seems to do a much better job of dithering the flat image then Flash can do with all the layer information it uses.

I am definitely going to check out this phone app framework.  Just what I have been looking for.

http://phonegap.com

I found this great simple ad free cgi script that you can install on nearly any webserver. Your shared hosting account probably won’t mind as long as you don’t advertise it and actually start getting lot’s of traffic through your site. Here is the best part, xav.com has creating a super simple installation script that will install it on your server for you. It even worked on my host gator account.  I use a proxy once in awhile just to see if a DNS changes I have progated to other servers.  Now that I can setup my own proxy I don’t have to get annoyed by the silly ads that other proxy sites always put right in front of you nose.