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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Dec 2001
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    MO
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    * Fraud orders after advertising on WHT (in offers forum)

    I've been on WHT for a very long time, but I've rarely ever advertised in the offers section. Well a couple of weeks ago I decided to see what was up and posted an offer thread... and then I got bombed with fraud attempts.

    I've found that almost 100% of the orders that came from WHT were fraud and in just two weeks they have accounted for more than 70% of the fraud attempts I have had this year.

    Anyway, I was just wondering if you guys had similar numbers and if you are banning any specific countries from ordering on your sites?

  2. #2
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    Mar 2009
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    Hmm, I would like to ask you. Is the fraud orders marked by Maxmind or was marked manually?

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Aug 2008
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    399
    It's not uncommon for MaxMind to mark quite a few of the orders we get from WHT -- not that all of them are fraud. Some of the people will gladly provide identity proof if you ask for it. Nonetheless, we get quite a few of legit orders.

    Most of the time when someone makes a fraud order it'll get a fairly high MaxMind score or come from an obvious open proxy.
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  4. #4
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    Quote Originally Posted by Farisworlds View Post
    Hmm, I would like to ask you. Is the fraud orders marked by Maxmind or was marked manually?
    Just to give you an idea, out of 20 fraud orders 16 were caught by maxmind and flagged.

  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by subigo View Post
    Just to give you an idea, out of 20 fraud orders 16 were caught by maxmind and flagged.
    I'm sure you know that Maxmind blocks high risk countries for example Indonesia and many more. So what you've to do is to check Fraud orders manually because their countries are highlighted as high risk via maxmind.

  6. #6
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    I don't have a problem catching fraudulent orders. I was just surprised by the number of fraud attempts that come from people browsing WHT. I mean, I understand why... WHT is a goldmine for people looking for a list of hosts to try a stolen credit card on, but man, percentage wise, WHT sends more than every other advertising channel I use combined.

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Dec 2007
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    We get bursts of fraudulent orders but most of them tend to originate from Google.
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  8. #8
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    Dec 2007
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    You can't blame WHT for it. Theres a ton of other sites that simply rss or in other ways capture wht posts and upload them as their own to other sites or as forum posts to other sites.

    Personally, never seen any problems with them.

    I don't know if we have any wht members but I do know we've gotten orders with wht mentioned as the source of the offer.
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  9. #9
    We get a few, but nothing out of the ordinary. Maxmind does it's best to identify them. I think fraud orders come from everywhere, not any specific place. It's an unfortunate situation but expected in this line of business.
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  10. #10
    Fraud orders come from all directions so you can't directly blame WHT. It could be that someone happened to google the keywords you used in our post and found it on WHT.

  11. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by woods01 View Post
    You can't blame WHT for it. Theres a ton of other sites that simply rss or in other ways capture wht posts and upload them as their own to other sites or as forum posts to other sites.

    Personally, never seen any problems with them.

    I don't know if we have any wht members but I do know we've gotten orders with wht mentioned as the source of the offer.
    Quote Originally Posted by David-CDD View Post
    Fraud orders come from all directions so you can't directly blame WHT. It could be that someone happened to google the keywords you used in our post and found it on WHT.
    Actually it's quite easy to blame WHT when you have the information to back it up. I can very easily say that Google is where most of our fraud orders come from because our tracking system keeps track of that sort of thing.

    At any rate, it's not WHT's "fault" but WHT could definitely be identified as the primary source.
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  12. #12
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    We've had a couple of incidents where the fraud orders were traced back to direct referrals from WHT, but nothing outstanding. Fraud is quite expected when dealing with the digital services industry.

    I'd say there are only about two fraud orders in our system from WHT that were caught and both were indeed fraudulent. Three others were flagged, but cleared our system. We also do see a lot of fraud from Google, but most of it is flagged by PayPal and our other card processors before they even clear.

    Yes, its unfortunate, but something you must put up with in the web hosting business from time to time. Best thing to do is make sure you have some tracking system on your site that links visitors back to referring sites and tracks their orders through the shopping cart. That way you can try to investigate a bit more and that usually helps us out.
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  13. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by sramadan View Post
    We've had a couple of incidents where the fraud orders were traced back to direct referrals from WHT, but nothing outstanding. Fraud is quite expected when dealing with the digital services industry.

    I'd say there are only about two fraud orders in our system from WHT that were caught and both were indeed fraudulent. Three others were flagged, but cleared our system. We also do see a lot of fraud from Google, but most of it is flagged by PayPal and our other card processors before they even clear.

    Yes, its unfortunate, but something you must put up with in the web hosting business from time to time. Best thing to do is make sure you have some tracking system on your site that links visitors back to referring sites and tracks their orders through the shopping cart. That way you can try to investigate a bit more and that usually helps us out.
    Only once have I seen our CC processor or PayPal catch the fraudulent use of a credit card. We've caught it manually numerous times.
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  14. #14
    We have lost a few legitimate order due to Maxmind marking them as fraud, but we have also gotten fraud orders that passed Maxmind. Thats why I always manually check each order to make sure they aren't wrongfully scored, fraud or not. Maybe those orders were legit in the first place. We have never had a problem from orders referred through our WHT offers though.
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  15. #15
    Join Date
    May 2007
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    WHT Fraud order percentage for us 1 out of 10 orders, However I find WHT a hotspot for short term customers that don't renew after one month and you find the account inactive on cPanel.
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  16. #16
    Join Date
    Jan 2010
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    Atlanta, GA
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    I am getting fraud orders too just after I post ads in offer section, so I was thinking is there any other means except maxmind or manual?
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  17. #17
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    Quote Originally Posted by Vaso View Post
    I am getting fraud orders too just after I post ads in offer section, so I was thinking is there any other means except maxmind or manual?
    There are other similar services out there to maxmind but generally maxmind + manual checking to back it up is as good as it gets. You may be able to have your payment gateway auto-fail any CC processes that fail AVS, which helps too.
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  18. #18
    Join Date
    Jun 2006
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    Fraud order really do come from everywhere, but using a tool like Maxmind can eliminate most of them very easily.

  19. #19
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    I have not had much problem with fraud orders coming from WHT.
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  20. #20
    We have more non-fraud orders than fraud orders. Not much you can do to prevent them from ordering unless it's by doing fraud checks with a script and manually.

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