I'm a TAMUK student currently enjoying my summer back in India.
Yesterday, there was this awesome deal for 50% off on ResellerScene. I immediately seized the opportunity. I used my US Bank based CreditCard for that order. My order was in Pending, and a ticket was opened by an Agent for the order. I was told that since my address was in TX, and my IP is in India, I'd have to upload a pic of the CreditCard. Before I could reply to that(hardly 24hrs) , my order went to "Terminated" status, and I was labeled a FRAUD !!
I don't want to upload the picture of my CC!! I've been defrauded twice in the past, and I don't wanna get into all that again.
What if I were a fraud, and I used Paypal and the very same card!? Would they be able to catch the fraud at all?
All (or nearly all) hosts employ fraud checking systems.
These will check everything from whether your IP address matches your billing address' location, to the type of e-mail address you use (a free one is never a good idea), and your location.
Having said that, they shouldn't have told you that you should upload a picture of your CC, and then proceeded to terminate your account anyway (within 24 hours). This would be a case of departments not talking to each-other, and thus one person told you to upload a picture, and then another employee noticed the order and marked it as fraud.
However unfortunately, fraud is huge online. Since starting my website host, I've had about 40% of customers as fraud (one even paid me, tried sending 8,000 spam e-mails, then did a chargeback..)
These measures are annoying, although sometimes necessary.
And unfortunately, having your address in TX and your IP in India would look very suspicious.
Just to clarify, I'm not defending ResellerScrene As I say, it's bad that ResellerScene said to upload the picture, then cancelled your order anyway. There's no good excuse for that.
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Last edited by tristanperry : 06-14-2008 at 02:28 PM.
Well.. yeah I guess its all about trying to protect themselves and other customers from fraudsters. Anyway, I used Paypal, and ordered again, and thankfully the order went through. I'm a happy man.
Thanks for the support - tristanperry
Personally running a business myself I can understand why the company did what they did. With how things are these days, fraud and identity theft is becomming more and more common. If I saw someone use a U.S. credit card on my site from say China or India for example or any other country, I would be a bit worried. I had someone use a credit card on my site once that was issued to someone in Texas, USA and the card was used by someone in Canada. So, the first thing I did was try to call the owner of the credit card in Texas to make sure the order was legit. If I could not reach the person, then I would have the transaction terminated immediately.
Yeah.. I didn't take it personally.. Just didn't like their lack of patience for my reply. Anyways.. I'm happy now that I'm able to go ahead with launching my small webhosting website and with such small capital as $5 = Rs200 /- !!
Just to clarify, we have a 0 tolerance policy on fraudulent orders and those that even remotely resemble anything close to fraud.
It's to our discretion how we deal with orders that do not pass our fraud tests.
It's to ensure the quality of orders placed on our clients and through our company delivering a product to that client.
If it looks suspicious, we immediately discredit the account and terminate the order. If somehow an order's payment went through, we end up refunding the payment and cancel the order. usually, people who use fraudulent accounts end up spamming our servers with junk e-mail or host illegal files.
We would rather just terminate the order or refund their payment and not have to deal with such hassles.
Just standard business practice
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it's actually not you, it's not you that's an issue, it's your location.
if you're in India at that time, you should have used your local credit card and not U.S. based credit card, that gave it, since most credit card processing software nowadays (i speak specifically of clickbank) scan the differences in ip address of the buyer and compares it with the ip address/location of the owner of the credit card. they can do this because of their database and pre-arrangement with credit card companies and with their (clickbank.com) added security they're able to scan differences in zip codes/ip addresses, based on experience.
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ResellerScene labelled me a Fraud!! 
As I say, it's bad that ResellerScene said to upload the picture, then cancelled your order anyway. There's no good excuse for that.
