Order from Malta

[bobsi18]

Hi there... Hope this is the right place to post this... I've had my site up and running for over a year now, and this is the first potential 'scam' i've come into contact with...

 

We've had an order placed through from Malta. The order is large (I think it's about $470 - in the customer's defence, the items ordered seem reasonable, i.e. a fair amount of time was spent picking the items, it's not just 100 of the same product). I'm using software other than osCommerce (in the middle of changing over :) ), which doesn't give me much control over shipping rates, so all over my site I say that 'International Customers should contact us to work out the best postage rate'. This customer was charged $170 postage, and didn't email me to ask why, or ask for a cheaper rate even though it's obviously very high.

 

So my question is how do you go about confirming credit card details for an order that might be suspect? Can you ring visa/mastercard and confirm address details? And is Malta a particularily 'dangerous' place as far as scams go (I've heard a lot about people in Nigeria scamming, and had a few of the Chinese scam emails).

 

If it's important, I'm located in Australia.

 

Thanks for any advice

~Barbara~

[running wolf]

Did they pay via Credit Card? For exactly this reason and some others I run all CC manually and have it set that the zip code of the billing address is required. No zip, no sale.

If possible I ship with tracking numbers, so far I have not have a bad sale outside USA, quite a few bad apples inside, tho.

[bobsi18]

Did they pay via Credit Card? For exactly this reason and some others I run all CC manually and have it set that the zip code of the billing address is required. No zip, no sale.

If possible I ship with tracking numbers, so far I have not have a bad sale outside USA, quite a few bad apples inside, tho.

Yep, it was paid via credit card (we do manual transactions too, we have a brick and mortar shop, so we just use the machine from there to do the transactions). They didn't provide a zip code, and the address looks slightly suss, but then again it could just be thats how they do address's in malta - I know that different countries write their address's different ways.

 

I've heard people say that they do their cc's manually offline, so that they can check out dodgy address's - is there a way that, as a merchant, I can check up on a registered cc?

 

Thanks ppls!

 

~Barbara~

[running wolf]

I think you can call some 1-800 number, but there should be a zip code, if not ask your post office.

I figure if they have the zip code of the CC mailing address it should be OK.