Understanding and Preventing Credit Card Fraud
A fraudulent customer can easily steal a credit card number and use it to place orders at your store. For this reason, when you sell items online, by telephone, or by mail, you need to take precautions to avoid fraud attempts. According to card association rules and even if the cardholder’s bank authorized the transaction, you are liable for losses if customers claim that their cards were used without their knowledge or consent. If this happens, you will be subject to a reversal of payment (also known as a chargeback).
By providing you with access to basic fraud detection tools, Smart Authorization and Advanced Smart Authorization, CyberSource validates your customers’ identities and guards against fraud losses. These subjects are discussed in
Configuring Smart Authorization
.
Rejection by the Smart Authorization tools is a
soft
reject as opposed to
hard
reject due to causes other than Smart Authorization, such as invalid data, invalid card, or a system error. You cannot capture these last orders.
If an order is rejected because it appears to be risky, and you verify that the order is legitimate, you can capture the authorization and fulfill the order. See
Reviewing Declined Credit Card Authorizations
for information.
