Using Location As A Weapon In The Fight Against Card Not Present Fraud

Knowing your enemy is the start to fighting any battle. Online, the merchant’s enemy is anyone who fraudulently orders goods or services either with stolen credit card numbers or by hacking into a customer’s account.

Internet Protocol (IP) geolocation is just one of the risk monitoring tools used by merchants, but can provide an important line of defense. IP geolocation is a Web technology that can accurately identify the real-world geographic location of an Internetconnected device – the moment the user clicks into a Web site. Using only the IP address
assigned to their computer, the country, state or even city can be identified reliably. IP geolocation is usually implemented as part of a back-end fraud or authentication system where merchants use the data to build business rules into their Web application which can flag suspect transactions and address them individually.