The new Advanced Fraud Detection Suite or AFDS for short is a set of very customizable, rule based filters and fraud detection tools that identify, manage and help prevent suspicious and potentially costly fraudulent transactions for your business. You can fully customize AFDS filters/rules and tools to suit your business’ needs and adeptly control how suspicious transactions are handled for your account, including the ability to approve, decline or hold transactions for manual review when filers are triggered.

U.S. merchants alone lost an estimated $4 billion to fraud in 2008. This is not matter to be taken lightly. Many merchant gateway accounts are just NOT designed for your card no present ecommerce business. I have worked with many shop owners who have switched to other gateways to lower fees, only to find themselves in a normal retail swiped card type application…. Resulting in more charge backs and fraudulent transactions, more than enough to eat up and bury any savings on fees. It is very important you have the proper tools designed for your ecommerce business. Would you go to WalMart for your office networking equipment– I certainly hope not!

So the new AFDS costs a few bucks ($9.95 a month), but the tools are cutting edge fraud preventing technology. There are a great many tools involved in the new suite, all of which are highly customizable for your business, but I am going to cover a few that most shop owners probably already wish they had!

1. Transaction Amount Filter – Set lower and upper transaction amount limits to restrict high risk transactions often used to test the validity of credit card numbers.
2. Hourly Transaction Velocity Filter – Limit the total number of transactions received per account,  per hour, preventing high volume attacks common with fraudulent transactions.
3. Transaction IP Velocity Filter – Identify suspicious activity from a single source by identifying excessive transactions sent from the same IP address.
4. Authorized AIM IP Addresses – Allows merchant submitting transactions through the Advanced Integration Method (AIM) to specify an absolute server IP addresses for websites permitted to submit transactions.
5. Enhanced AVS Handling Filter – The Address Verification Service (AVS) is a standard feature of the payment gateway that compares the address submitted with an transaction to the address on file with the shopper’s credit card issuing bank. Merchants can then choose to reject, flag or allow transactions based on the AVS response codes.
6. Shipping Address Verification Filter – Will verify that the provided shipping address received with an order is in fact a valid postal address. ((WOW))
7. IP Shipping Address Mismatch Filter – Compare the supplied shipping address to the IP address of where the shopper submitted the order from. This helps to determine whether or not the order is shipping to the same country from which it originated.
8. Regional IP Address Filter – Flag, filter, reject or allow orders coming from specific regions or countries. Filter actions are based on an entire geographic area, or single country by country.

So in essence, as far as I have been able to determine, this new suite brings Authorize.net to the top of the food chain for fraud prevention and supplied tools for ecommerce merchants. If you’ve never had a fraudulent transaction, that’s great… But the likelihood is you will. Credit card fraud on the web is growing at an alarming rate and if you haven’t the tools to fight back, you will likely suffer at the hands of a thief.

Check out the rate for processing your transactions with Authorize.net… You just might be surprised that the best tools in the industry are the best prices as well! make sure to also pay a visit to the fraud prevention center for tips and best practices to utilize in your online store and prevent fraudulant transactions.