Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Avoid Credit Card Fraud

We recently shipped an engine to a customer in the great state of Louisiana near the end of December. It was a nice, expensive Cadillac engine. The customer said that their boyfriend was a mechanic and was going to install the engine, so we shipped it to their home (home delivery is not at all rare - many folks install their engine themselves). Everything our system asks for (and it asks for a lot as we take Credit Card Fraud very seriously) matched on the credit charge.

Needless to say, we got a call about two weeks later from our merchant services. The owner of the card had reported it stolen. At first, we were a bit miffed because of the fact that the owner of the card had signed for the engine. We thought it was a case of someone ordering an engine and simply deciding that they didn't want to pay for it.

Well, today we got a phone call from the police. They let us know they had recovered our engine. Turns out that this person was a huge identity thief. They worked at some kind of online merchant and stole a lot of folks info - the cops recovered massive amounts of data in notebooks on people.

We at Low Mileage Engines are proud of the methods we use to minimalize credit card fraud. Sadly, even the best systems aren't perfect.

Oh well. One fraudster is going to jail.