With the new era of online business upon us, it is imperative that anyone using their own merchant account be aware of the dangers of credit card fraud. It's out there, and it's rampant. I know from personal experience. Do not ever take it for granted that each order is valid, do your due diligence, or pay for it in heavy fees incurred by chargebacks from your merchant account or third party payment processor such as SafePaySolutions, PayPal, etc.

If you're an online merchant, here are some things you should check, if your orders are sent to you:

1. Go to DexOnline.com and make sure that the phone number matches the person's name and address.

2. Call 411 if you have to find out, if DexOnline.com doesn't give you the info. Believe me the 411 charge is a lot cheaper than a chargeback!

3. Most fraudsters have a certain "style" about them. For instance, mine didn't like to capitalize names, only sometimes. There was a definite pattern.

4. Most fraudsters use free email accounts. And lots of times the email doesn't seem to "match" the person's name. For instance, say the person ordering's name is: Lisa Sorensen and the email is olatbilly@yahoo.com.

5. Many fraudsters use anonymous surfing sites to go to sites and make purchases. Using a service such as MaxMind.com's service will help you be able to tell when this is happening and also gage the fraud rating of any particular order. You can get 1000 free transaction checks when you first join. I highly recommend it.

I had one guy charging up thousands of dollars on other people's cards, to by leads from my website, just so he could phish (send leading emails to get people's credit card info) and get more info to use to by more leads. Crazy, I tellya! He was very persistent and wouldn't stop, even admitted to me that he did it. They are very brave! I contacted the person who's card he used and by then he had charged up over $5000 on their card! If I hadn't noticed it was fraud, he could've done a lot more damage than that. He had bought from NBC.com, which scares me, because you think that a huge corporation such as them would have better security than that. But, the fact is, most merchant accounts do NOT provide ANY type of protection whatsoever. This guy was even using the three numbers on the back of the people's cards. How he got those, we'll never know.

My biggest piece of advice to everyone is to never, never, ever give out your credit card information to anyone. I don't care WHAT the email says happened to your account, or what they say on the phone. They should know the answers to your security questions such as your mother's maiden name or city of birth. Call them on it. Always call your credit card issuing bank FIRST before believing anything you read in an email or hear from a phone call. Whatever it is, it can wait that long, believe me.

I hope this info has helped you, feel free to use this article however you choose, just please keep the credits intact.