Cardholder address verification in Actinic Payments

[lefty]

When we used to take credit cards ourselves and got an unusual looking transaction, we could do a "code 10" request from our merchant account bank (HSBC in our case) to get verification of the cardholder address to see if matched the delivery address being requested buy the customer.

Now we are using Actinic Payments / Creditcall we steill get dodgy looking transactions but I can find no way of verifying details. I have a payment that has cleared OK (but been flagged "held" by 3rd mand due to "value / email address" but AP normally does not check overseas addresses or postcodes at all and as I do not have the card number I cannot contact my bank as before.

The suggestion from Actinic support was to contact the customer, but as I only have the details they have given me, if they are fraudulent, of course they will just confirm them.

Actinic support tell me that CreditCall will charge me "up to £500" to actually talk to me about the transaction, but have sent them details on my behalf to see what they can do without charging. 24 hours later and no response.

This must be something that affects all Actinic Payments users. Does anyone know how to verify cardholder address details?

[lefty]

Follow up

Actinic support have now come back and said that Credit Call cannot provide any further information and I will have to decide whether to send the order on the basis of what I have got from 3rd Man (nothing of any use).

I don't want to decline and refund a £450 order that could well be perfectly OK but also do not want a fraudulent transaction. All I want is to confirm the cardholder address!!!

I have now contacted the customer and asked them to give me the rest of the creidt card number that I do not already have in Actinic Payments record so I can do a manual code 10 enquiry with HSBC, but customer thinks I should not be asking for it as transaction is already clearded and they are worried about security (which is perfectly correct).

So, no progress and this is really not satisfactory - there must be an answer to this or Actinic Payments is not really fit for its purpose?

[leehack]

Refund it, if it was legit, they wouldn't mind helping you out to confirm it is so. Gonna pee you off far more if it turns out to be fraud than it is losing that sale IMO.

[Darren B]

AP does post code and address verification, look at the transaction and your see if it passed or not.

Also you can force it to reject orders that do not conform under the setup in actinic.

How this effects delivery address i dont know, but if your concerned about shipping to another address then decline the order

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

If you click on 'View Payments' in the 'Progress and Payments' tab you should get confirmation whether the address and post code match the card billing address. (See image attached).


EDIT: I have just realised you may be talking about an overseas transaction where the address and post code are npt checked.

[Darren B]

EDIT: I have just realised you may be talking about an overseas transaction where the address and post code are npt checked.

I missed that, i dont believe any overseas are checked, i have never had one pass todate and i think i have shipped to just about all countries in the eu at some time

[lefty]

Thanks for your comments

It was an overseas transaction (Tbilisi, Georgia, which is not, in itself, unusual for us as we get orders from pretty much every country in the world)) and was not checked by AP/CreditCall. It is also my experience that very few overseas addresses or postcodes are checked, just the CVC verification (3 digit number at end of signature strip).

I agree that if the customer won't help resolve it that is a giood indocator of possible fraud and I don't plan to send this one as customer does not want to give me the full credit card number.

On the other hand, there IS still a weakness in the system here as the card payment has actually cleared online and I think there really should be a way to verify overseas cardholder addreses (like to old manual "Code 10" enquiry to the bank).

[george]

I used to use the Code 10 check every week. It was a handy option.

[Mark H]

Even if transactions have apparently cleared online, it is often the case that our PSP subsequently flags up a potential problem (email address used with other cards etc). This might not be the case here, but I think you could legitimately go back and ask for more info. When we do this, 9 times out of 10 the customer is OK with it on the basis that we are protecting the cardholder. If they get the huff, we would cancel the transaction on the basis that they had not allowed us to make further checks.

[brucet]

Hi Keith, I understand your dilemma but unfortunately the mechanism for AVS checking doesn't exist in most countries of the world. The biggest PSP is probably Authorize.net in the States, and even they don't offer it internationally.

Code 10 is a service provided by the banks, it might be worth putting your problem to yours to see if they can suggest an alternative approach for PSP orders.

The Third Man checking is very extensive and does include some level of address checking. I'm not sure it extends to checking the cardholder's registered address, they probably don't have access to that; but they do check for patterns of fraud associated with particular addresses.

[YvonneM]

3rd Man Problems

Like Keith, I am finding it really frustrating trying to figure out how this 3rd man comes up with it's fraud score.
I've only been with Actinic payments for a few months and had 6 chargebacks so far, whereas previously with HSBC as my PSP for 4 years, I only ever had 2.
Because all of my customers are overseas, (Expat Essentials), even my regular, genuine customers are given a high fraud score, so the actual fraudulent orders don't stand out and in some cases, the fraud score is very low.
The problem is that there's no way to interpret the results to make a proper judgement, whereas with HSBC, I used to get a plain English message back, such as 'billing address different to address held by card issuer' etc. As Keith says, you could also ring up with a Code 10 for verification if still in doubt. I've contacted support about this and been told there's nothing that can be done, other than taking out a new contract with 3rd man!! Changing to Actinic Payments has been a very expensive exercise for me so far and I really hope that Actinic will address this issue!

Yvonne
www.expatessentials.com

[cbarling]

We are actually working to get the 3rd Man messages to have a better explanation and in particular to indicate whether each one is indicating whether fraud is more or less likely.

I didn't think that you could get a Code 10 check on overseas orders. Do people have previous experience of getting Code 10's for overseas addresses?

I also believe that the AVS check integrated into Actinic Payments is simply an automatic version of the Code 10. If I am wrong here, please can someone point out the differences.

On the 6 chargebacks, could you let us know what the 3rd Man scores were? Were they average, or were they significantly different from the average? This would be very useful information.

By the way, did you flag the payments as having charegbacks in Actinic? That way 3rd Man makes a note and acts accordingly in the future.

Chris

[YvonneM]

3rd Man

Hi Chris,

I definitely used to be able to get a code 10 check for my overseas customers, HSBC used to suggest it if there were any concerns and gave me the number to call.

I'm not sure about the AVS check, but I thought that was 'address verification'. Could be wrong though.

The scores for my fraudulent orders were; 45, 54, 57, 89, 108 and 118. Although some of these scores would seem high for people only dealing with UK orders, a lot of my genuine customers have scores up in the 90's & 100's. In fact one of my regular customers scored 145!

Unfortunately, I can't flag these orders as chargebacks, because it only allows you to choose 'ok' or 'reject' on the feedback for held orders.

It's great that you're working on this problem. From my perspective, all I would like is to be able to have something concrete, mesages such as addresses not matching or postcode different to billing address etc, to be able to email my customer about and check their response. This would probably be enough then to know if they were genuine or not.

Thanks,
Yvonne

[cbarling]

We're in the process of testing some changes to provide more information on the 3rd Man scores. Hopefully these will be live in a handful of weeks.

Chris

[Darren]

In regards to address checking, Actinic Payments sends the authorization to the bank asking for an address check to be performed (you can override this within the Actinic Payments configuration within Actinic). The bank then decide what to do with it. Often with non UK cards it is not possible for UK based acquirers to verify the address. You can see whether an address has been checked or not by opening the order going to ‘Progress & Payments’. If you are using version 10.0.2 or above you can configure Actinic Payments to use the ‘Strict’ method on Address checking, so if the bank is unable to perform an address check then the payment is declined straight away, although this will result in all transactions for addresses that cannot be checked to be declined.

Chris has mentioned our improved 3rd Man Rule String descriptions, and they are on their way. I have seen them in action and they are indeed a huge step forward, they give a meaningful description and actually tell you the affect they have on the overall scoring of the card. For instance a telephone number not being supplied adds a 2 to the score, where a Surname of cardholder in the email as part or all of the prefix before the @ symbol will deduct 14.