The Security Mentor

You're a small to medium sized merchant. You throw the newspaper across the room when it says that consumers and banks are losing billions to credit card fraud, because you know perfectly well who gets stuck with the bill.

This Christmas is likely to be worse than last year because of the rise of "phishing" scams. What's going to happen is that crooks will know all the information that the real cardholder could give you. They'll have the card verification number from the back of the card, mother's maiden name, and anything else you could think of. And at Christmastime, it's not like you can insist on only shipping to the billing address.

You can use the old standard practices like calling back to confirm a huge order placed at 3 AM by a new "customer", and you can check out the card issuer's "address verification service", but nothing I've heard of will work 100%.