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[HC Shark]

Hello,

The Internet fraud has in increased a lot within the last year. This results in an large number of fraudulent orders submitted to online merchants. Host Color has a long experience in fighting online fraud. We have opened this thread to help our own customers to better deal with the fraud and to demonstrate to anyone that Host Color has been always safe.

We see 2 different trends:

• The fraudulent attempts made from U.S. IP addresses is increasing
• There are number of risky countries that keep their fraud score very high. Some of them are in Europe, some in Africa and Asia

We shall not publish the names of the high-risk countries because we do not want to hurt anyone's dignity (there are jerks everywhere). However we have already tightened up the process of online ordering. Please see what we do to prevent fraud. You might consider to implement similar policy in your online store:

1. New anti-fraud tools have been installed in Host Color. We double check all orders through 2 different automated anti-fraud gateways and after taht do manual review. Our advise to you is to ask your merchant provider about their anti-fraud tools (Authorise.net for example has a tool that costs only $9.95/moonth) and to try MaxMind solutions.

2. We have added fraud-call to the order process. It prevents fraudulent orders to go through. Anyone who has submitted an order is required to pass a phone verification procedure. It might be done through a phone call or text message... (Review the anti-fraud solutions of Telesign and Maxmind).

3. If you target a national market only you shall probably consider to activate options such as:

• To ban orders submitted without a billing address
• To ban orders made from foreign IP addresses
• To ban orders if the IP address mismatch the billing address
• To ban orders made from anonymous proxies
• Filter or prevent users that come from IP networks identified as high-risk ones to submit orders on your website
• Ban email addresses and or consider not to process orders from free email addresses

Those are only very few of the anti-fraud measures you would consider to implement. We have already made some of them part of our fraud-prevention policy.

You can join this discussion if you need help on fighting fraud.