yesterday and today i got 3 new hosting a/c orders all originating from the same IP range owned by Macedonian Post & Telecommunications

62.162.127.78
62.162.133.219
62.162.127.77

the order from the first ip made it to settlement in revecom.com's merchant account control center and was to an address in Greece

the 2nd order came from the 2nd ip address and was made out in a different name to someone in Florida, USA

the 3rd order came from the 3rd ip address had the same exact address and name as in 2rd order but the email address was the same as the first order and had same ending credit card digits as in 2nd order but not first

illustration of what i the orders look like with made up details

1st order
John Doe
123 address1
Greece
email@domain.com

2nd order
Jane Doe
456 address2
Florida USA
email2@domain2.com

3rd order
Jane Doe
456 address2
Florida USA
email@domain.com

so that's how it looks and all ip addresses originate from the same service provider and notice the 1st order and 3rd order has the same email address

i tried contacting the first order person via email and didn't get any reply since he entered a invalid domain extension and format for the domain the requested the account to be setup for

added these were all orders for hosting for 3 - 6 month terms as well!

how do you guys handle this?

i tend to think i'll wait until i get a reply from the first order to see whether of not i'll even setup an account. ???

Yeah, good idea. Contact your payment processor and let them know too. You don't want to bite the chargeback fee in the end.

We get on the phone and call them. Do you have the phone #s? We would at least call the Florida #'s. Your examples stink of fraud. Better to catch it up front than via 3 chargebacks a month from now. :bawling: JMHO

This is why I have my own merchant account and gateway. I manually authorize the cards and then manually charge them through the software provided by my financial establishment.

I've been working on this hosting company for over a month now, and we hope to be up by friday.

I think its much safer to have your own merchant accounts so these things don't end up getting processed by your credit card company.

well i notified revecom of the issue via their support system and the last 2 orders were declined by revecom.. but the first one made it through hmmm

Still, I like being my own merchant.

Lets say that one charge that got through - what if someone actually owned that card and filed a dispute claim w/ their CC company... you'd probably be hit w/ a charge back.

xnet,
You're doing things proper right out of the gate. The upfront fees scare new hosts off, but when the chargebacks hit...and they will... the 3rd party processor's fees get very high very fast

Cheers
Kat

Originally posted by grafikat
xnet,
You're doing things proper right out of the gate. The upfront fees scare new hosts off, but when the chargebacks hit...and they will... the 3rd party processor's fees get very high very fast

Cheers
Kat

Thanks :D

I've been doing a lot of research on this - plus I've been designing websites for 7 years and using paid web hosts for about 5 years now.

I must say this forum is very useful. Thanks again :D

Heres a list of our current .htaccess file, I figured it would be useful to other hosting companies that find denying ips is a good way to prevent fraud. It certainly has worked for WHN in drastically cutting our fraudulent signup rate

http://www-hosting.net/denied.html

If you would like to share your list of ips that are not on the list, please email me at admin@www-hosting.net

Regards