I own a small ecommerce business and sell goods online. a few instances have come up where someone will make a purchase and have it Sent to another address. all credit card info is there security code, billing info all matches up and the product is sent. a month later it becomes a charge back and i am somehow responsible for the transaction. In the past, there is nothing the police will do about it other than writing a report. How can i go after or prevent this from happening> can i send these people into collections? how do i do that? can anyone please help?
If you know the address, hire someone to fly out and meet them in person. That will be the last time you'll see them as your "customers". On a serious note - everything depends on the amount of money they "owe" you.
I've had this happen a couple of times. Usually the orders are a bit strange and you can figure them out. I had one a few months back that was shipped to the normal address, but was changed to pick up at the UPS office, with the tracking number we provided them. As we sell many restricted items, we often ask for ID, or other verification they're in the trade. I even got a class certificate from this purchaser. I find that they want things send out next day air, or second day air. Usually fairly expensive items. Years ago, they tried to order $1000-$2000 items. Not so, any more. It's a part of doing business, I suppose, but it's certainly a big pain.
On one site where I've purchased some services there was very easy additional verification process which I can advise anyone to use if you are not fully sure if your customer is not fraud. They asking me to send a scan of any kind of documents for billing details I've used in my order like Driver's License or Passport. Probably it's not very convenient for your customers but it could you protect from such frauds and prevent any chargebacks as in most cases such users doesn't has such data. It still possible to make some fake documents but usually such users looks the easiest ways just to get something and wouldn't like any additional steps in receiving stollen items.
I've had fraudulent ID's faxed and emailed to me before. If you're dealing with people who know what they're doing, it will be a breeze for them. And asking legit customers to go through such steps will discourage at least 75% of them from buying anything from you.
As I said it's not very convenient and doesn't give 100% protection but you should to go with some additional fraud checks if you see that billing and delivery details are different.
May I ask which shopping cart you are using? Does it not have a built in fraud monitoring system? VPASP Shopping Cart does and it helps our customers reduce charge backs by 98% Take a look - http://www.vpasp.com/virtprog/fraudcheck.htm
How do you know it's the same billing address? Are you getting a full AVS match, or just the zipcode? Also if you look at the instances where this is happening is the shipping address different from the billing? What's the typical chargeback reason code, I'm assuming it's not a "not as described" code?
A lot of popular online stores take some extra security measures when it comes to transactions. They first of all block purchases from all suspicious countries (I'm sure you can find a list) and also a payment processor. Instead of direct payments to e.g. your PayPal account, use a payment processor such as 2Checkout. They'll run a fraud check on the client and if he passes, they'll forward the payment.
On the latest one I got, it was a "Did not make charge" was given as a reason. Even though I sent UPS delivery confirmation.