Black Friday started early this year: set up your fraud checks before the phone orders start

A caller you’ve never heard of wants the most expensive piece in the case. They don’t ask about the price — they read the card number fast, want it shipped overnight to an address two states away, and the sale approves. In February, the chargeback shows up, and the piece is gone.

That call is about to come earlier this year. Walmart’s early Black Friday deals run November 12 to 15, two weeks before Black Friday itself on November 27. Shoppers are starting sooner. So is the stretch of phone and online orders that a stolen card can hide in.

An approval isn’t the end of it

An approval means the card was open and had room on it — not that the person on the phone owns it.

Under Visa’s rules, when a cardholder says they didn’t make a purchase that was taken online or over the phone, their bank can dispute it for up to 120 calendar days after the sale was processed. A sale processed on November 12 can come back as late as March 12 — by then the piece is long gone and the money has been in your account for months.

An approval means the card works. It doesn’t mean the person using it owns it.

Where the rules protect you, and where they don’t

How the card reached you decides who eats the loss.

• At the counter, with the chip: Under Visa’s rules, a bank can’t bring a counterfeit-card dispute on a sale where your terminal read the chip. That protection goes away when a chip card is swiped on a terminal that can’t read chips.
• Online, with Visa Secure: Visa Secure is Visa’s version of EMV 3-D Secure, the check where the customer’s bank confirms it’s really them at checkout. When the bank confirms the shopper that way and your processor passes that confirmation along with the sale, Visa’s rules generally block a stolen-card dispute on it. There are narrow exceptions, so it cuts the risk rather than ending it.
• Over the phone, which is the exposed one: Visa Secure is an online-checkout check, and a card number read to you over the phone doesn’t go through it. A matching billing address helps you spot a bad order, but it isn’t on Visa’s list of reasons a stolen-card dispute gets thrown out.

What to set up this week

Do this before the early sales bring the first wave of strangers to your phone line.

1. 01Ask your processor which checks are on. Address verification, the security code, and Visa Secure on your online checkout. Get the answer in writing, not from memory.
2. 02Move big phone orders online. For a high-ticket piece, send the caller a secure payment link instead of keying the number in. Ask your processor whether its payment links run Visa Secure.
3. 03Ship big orders to the billing address. A buyer who wants rush shipping somewhere else, tries a second card after the first declines, or doesn’t care what it costs deserves a callback before anything leaves the store.
4. 04Keep the paper trail. Order notes, the call log, tracking with a signature on delivery. You’ll want all of it in February. We covered the disputes that don’t start with fraud at all separately, and the same records help with those.
5. 05Tell your processor a busy month is coming. A sudden jump in volume can trip a limit or a hold. We wrote about keeping December from hitting a ceiling.

One call before the rush

Before November 12, call your processor and ask three questions: Is address verification on? Does my online checkout use Visa Secure? Can I send phone customers a payment link instead of keying their card? If you don’t get clear answers, talk to an expert at 770-766-1060.