In my search to decrease the probability of fraudulous orders, several people have mentioned that it is best to block any orders made by someone who gives an email from a free email account such a s hotmail.com, yahoo.com, etc. Does it make sense to you?

Where could I find a list of all free-e-mail accounts?

Thanks

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=290294&highlight=block+free+email

Excellent thread Lorenz -- Thank you

Now how do I do that? (banning free e-mail accounts)
There are so many companies providing these accounts. Is there an up-to-date list somewhere? Or is there a simple way to do that? A way to quickly recognize valid email addresses?

I don't suggest you to not process people with free email accounts.
Accourding to our stats for example 97% of orders placed by people with hotmail accounts are fair orders.

This can be just another flag to help you during antifraud verification process. For example you can proceed with verification call for orders placed with free email accounts.

i hae a free email account...just cause its more convienint for me...and i lke how gmail is setup.... :(

Almost 80% of my customer are using free email account.

Can you guarantee an ISP email is a good order. No, not really,
last year I received an order from Greece, the email was Greece ISP account, this Greece ISP email looked something like xxxx@xxx.gr, finally this Greece customer claimed that he did not make the purchase which he already received the goods, and I got a chargeback even I had the proof of delivery.

I use free Email(Hotmail) also. I use free E-mail because if you change your ISP your E-mail address does not change.

I always have used free e-mail accounts for myself. I am responsible. The daily paper where I live has a forum where they limit participation to those with a paid [i.e. non anonymous] e-mail. Participation could be better. The quality of the discussion was not great. I could have gotten such an address from my internet service provider to sign up there, but it didn't seem worth it. I would not cut off free e-mails.

Some free email orders are legitimate.
Make a phone verification and run some auto check fraud tools for your confidence.

bourouba - this debate is just about as hot as the ASP/PHP and *NIX/Windows debates. It depends on your clients. I got my own domain about six years ago to have my own email - and ever since, never relied on my ISPs emails. I have free emails, but I never use them or give them out.

I have blocked free emails for one of our site selling IT courses. In about 2 months, there is not a considerable decline in sales. However, many new customers demand to enable free email address for signup.

Even after blocking the free emails, we received a chargeback from a customer in New Zealand. He used his @govt.nz email address. I sent an email to the abuse report contact of the domain but no response yet.

So blocking free emails might reduce the chargebacks but you cannot eliminate it.

allhostnet -- how do you block free emails?

And yes I do understand that it does not eliminate fraud completely. That would be impossible.

I accept orders from free e-mail addresses, but I watch the order.

We request our customers to register with an off network email account - and usually, this ends up being a free one.

Theres absolutely nothing wrong with free accounts and blocking them completely will cost you ALOT more money then the incidents of fraud you are receiving..

If you really want to block fraud - verify every order before activating - verify billing IP = IP of registration - verify whois info of any domain they may have registered or are transferring - call the customer and verify the order - if youre really paranoid - fax the customer an authorization form to sign and return to you.

These steps alone will resolve a big chunk of your fraud issues -

I guess that it all depends on what kind of products you are selling. In our case we will start selling downloadable sound files. As soon as the customer credit card has been cleared the customer can download the file. It is all automated. Within 5 minutes he should have the file on his desktop.

That is why I am looking for ways to decrease fraudulous buyers using anti-fraud tools while they are paying with their credit card. We could block any order that looks suspicious and call these particular people. We will also request an address verification for orders that are higher than the usual amount and/or are using a free email address - as Tmonster suggested above.

The other thing to consider is that professional fraud artist will have no interest at all in our products. They can't really resell it and it would only give them a sound file... Why bother? They seem to be interested primarily with high cost products they can resell - such as jewelry or computer parts.

I appreciate all the advice and ideas above. This is such a great forum. Very valuable experience and information. Thanks everyone

Although only about 36% of our customers use free e-mail accounts such as GMail or Yahoo, I still allow it. There are no risks with it if you have some type of fraud verification system with the signup (Examples: VariLogix FraudCall + AFIS, FraudGate and more). We personally use FraudCall, and since our signup, not one fraudulent order, with free e-mail domains, nor private e-mail domains.

It just depends on how your system is setup :)

Originally posted by bourouba
allhostnet -- how do you block free emails?


I posted a link in some other thread, containing about 15000 free email providers. I have a modified list, can I post it here?

In fact our IT courses site uses aMember script, it has a feature to ban the signups based on IP address or email address/domain.

The reason to eliminate free email signups
------------------------------------------------------
Till May 2004 we used 2checkout. During the month of May 2004, we received three chargebacks, all having free email addresses, resulting in our 2CO accounts terminated, blocking our $5k. You know, all the three orders were passed by the 2CO's fraud analyst.

Analysing our all previous chargebacks we found that every such order had a free email address. Therefore, we blocked them.

If you dont want clients with free email accounts send them my way at http://www.ccccanada.com.

I think it is foolish not to accept a client because of a free email address. Our system verifies everyone anyway.

Once a client signs up they use their own domain email anyway only a lot of people think that yahoo and hotmail accounts are great because they just dont know any better.