Do any of you readers sell anything online or by mail order? If you do then I think this may be of interest to you.

Over the years we have been the unfortunate subjects of some pretty decent Card Fraud Attempts. At the beginning of the the year we were stung for two quite large amount, around the £5000 mark both times. Both of these incidents were either deliveries to a different address or for collection.

We do quite a large amount of trade in situations like this so we were reluctant to loose these orders (of which the vast majority are legitimate) but as we work on very low mark-ups we would need to trade around £50,000 to recover these losses. So we needed to come up with a solution.

These days mail order/internet transactions paid on card are so well protected that in real terms we have no guarantee whatsoever of getting the money. This helped us in making a 'plan of action' to counter these frauds.

In the past we have had incidents where we have delivered to the card holders address, our vehicle tracking system proves the vehicle parked outside the property, we received a signature from the card holder, we entered the property and identified other items inside the property, we returned and have photographic proof of our goods being installed to the property, yet the customer has said 'No I never received the items' and the card issuer had reclaimed the payment. 'Not enough proof' is the card issuers stance. If anyone is interested in this I will post the whole story at a later date if enough people ask.

So the reason this lack of payment security helped us reach a plan was because we though 'if we are not guaranteed our payment even when we have followed the guidelines rigorously there is no point following them at all.'

In order to prevent card fraud the guidelines given by the card issuer to us as a mail order supplier is to 'always deliver to the card holders address and always ensure that a signature is obtained'. As I have detailed above this does not actually guarantee your money anyway. So ignoring these guidelines was our first decision.

So we needed a method of ensuring that the customer was the card holder and that they wanted the items. And we needed proof that they had ordered them.

We devised a method of checking the customers details using what we call a security letter. I will detail below a real life example of  how this works and how it has just (today) helped prevent a £7,000 loss.

Mr. Atkins (name changed) places an order online for, amongst other things, some Walnut Interior Doors. In his email he mentioned that he lives in Wales but he needs delivery to a London address. He added 'I can provide identification if required'.

We quote Mr Atkins and enter his order up onto our system and booked a delivery date for approx. 5 days in the future.

After processing the order we send out our security letter which is basically a letter detailing his order but it also says the following: -

     'Hello Mr. Atkins. Many thanks for your order. As you have requested goods for either collection or for delivery to an alternative address we are sending you this letter as a security precaution. Please can you call us on 0114 220 2250 to confirm the following password {random letters and/or numbers] to ensure you are in receipt of this letter. Unfortunately we are not able to deliver your goods until this has been done. Yours sincerley, Distinctive Doors Sales Team.' etc.

Two days later we receive an email from 'Mr Atkins' asking us to confirm delivery of the items on our quoted date.

We also receive a telephone call from a rather bemused Mr Atkins. This Mr Atkins informs us that he is in receipt of our security letter. We thank him for calling to confirm but before we can finish he informs us that he has NOT placed the order.

It turns out that the original Mr. Atkins is not the card owner, is pretending to be Mr. Atkins working for a company called 'Oceanadon Properties' and is attempting to receive the doors using the real Mr. Atkins' card.

So you can see here how this procedure saved us a lot of money, allerted Mr. Atkins to the attempt to defraud him (he contacted his bank and they cancelled his card, these guys had already made other orders besides ours which I believe Mr Atkins was not aware of previously) and saved the bank and other retailers further losses from continued fraudulant use.

I believe that this procedure often helps fraudulent orders even getting to this stage as we tell the customer that they have to go through this security check in order to receive the items (in this case 25 of our Amadora Walnut doors plus frames and fittings) as often they potential fraudster bails out at this stage knowing they cannot receive the letter and the real card owner would be alerted.

If you (the retailer) do not already have a procedure like this in place I would strongly recommend that you implement it.

The follow up story in this case is that we (and the real 'Mr Atkins') informed the police and they were considering of visiting the delivery address at the time and date we had initially intended to do our delivery with a view to 'knicking' the fake Mr Atkins. If I hear any more on this I will let you know.

More info. on card security can be found at Card Watch and at the BBC News website.

I hope this info is useful to anyone reading and that you can use it to keep your money where it belongs, in your own pockets.