Weekly Issue #52 - Happy Birthday 

Celebrating our first full year of Merchant Education

Here is how the scam works: A person from West Africa, usually Ghana, Nigeria, or Accra, calls a U.S. business via one of the online Relay Services and requests to place an order. They provide the credit card number, and usually the name and address of the credit card holder, but request that the merchandise be shipped to Africa or an alternate U.S. address. The credit card information is always stolen and often doesn't go through. When this happens they have an alternate credit card to use or even give you multiple credit cards to use with the purchase. If you ask for the CVV number on the back of the card they either can't provide it or they provide a made up one because they don't have the card. They often ask that it be shipped immediately, as it is urgently needed, and they sometimes provide a stolen UPS shipping account number. 

Relay operators are actually beginning to report these incidents to the credit card companies- valiantly, I might add, as recording the numbers, and breaking confidentiality risk their immediate termination and possible criminal prosecution!  Some of them report spending over 90% of their time relaying fraudulent overseas purchases (see their forum here).

Fortunately, our merchant was savvy enough to catch this as it was happening:  "I received a phone call from Sprint Relay service explaining to me that someone was on the line and that they would read to me what the person typed in on the other end... When I did the math, this brought the total to over $2,400. Of course as a merchant, I would love to make a sale of that amount, but realizing that something was wrong, I didn't. Red flag two came when the scam artist insisted that I run the card immediately. I first asked for a phone number, and he refused to give me one (red flag number three). I also asked for the bank name that provided the card and he refused to give that to me (red flag number four). I then called Mastercard, got the bank's phone number through the use of the credit card number. Next I called the bank and informed them of what just happened. They took care of everything from there, closing out the account and getting the customer a new card."  Congratulations and many thanks to Charles M. for his permission to reprint this excerpt of his experience.

Suggestion Box: Got an idea? Can you think of an improvement on any of our products?  Is there anything you think we do that could stand improvement?  Let us know!  Send your suggestions to: info@merchantanywhere.com 
we want to hear from you!

After publishing 52 issues of this weekly newsletter, we have received tons of feedback, and we are changing to accommodate our readers requests, the first of which is to make the "Fraud Watch" a regular column, as you can see on the right hand side of this newsletter..  We will be doing this, focusing on fraud and fraud-avoidance information each and every week from now on.  

In these weekly newsletters, we give our merchants information on fraud, scams, and how to protect from being stung by them.  When new merchants call in, we find ourselves directing them to dozens of different newsletters, in order to help them "catch up" on this most important information.  In order to make this easier, we have created our "Fraud Watch" page, for a single, complete resource on the latest fraud and fraud avoidance information.

The company will also be celebrating it's 4th birthday, on March 19th, 2001.  The last four years have been exciting, but hang on.. there is a lot more coming!

What the heck is a Froogle??  EVERYONE knows Google, the fantastic search engine.  In Fact, if you are not using Google Adwords to promote your site, then the best advice I have is: START NOW.  If you are, or aren't, but want to take advantage of a new, FREE method of boosting your Google listings, list your products in Froogle, Google's younger sister.  Why??  Well, how about this:  Google is serving Froogle results in it's searches... at the top!   It's enough that the big Search Engine newsletters are posting comments like: 

When a major change comes along in search engine operation, some win, and some lose.  Post your products on Froogle (FOR FREE) and be on the winning side.  Note: You can get info on submitting here.

DISCOVER gets a new acceptance logo. You can download this logo, along with decals, signs and other point of purchase materials using the link at the bottom of this newsletter.  Do you need to update?  Heck no, but the new logo is certainly more attractive, and if you accept Discover on your web site, displaying the new logo will show that you keep up-to-date.

SPAM PROOF your web site! There are programs that search the web, and "harvest" e-mail addresses from your web site.  Here is an easy way to stop these programs COLD.  Its FREE and easy to do.  Here is how it works:  If you have an email address on your website, like this:
inform@merchantanywhere.com 
Then a "harvester" can find it, and add it to it's list of victims to spam.  How do you prevent this?  Simple.  Use the FREE email Email Obfuscator available at: http://king-cart.com/cgi-bin/obfuscator.cgi this will take your email address, and change it into this:

So What?  Well... If you take this result, and paste it into your HTML, it will APPEAR on your site as a normal email address like this:
inform@merchantanywhere.com
BUT the email harvesters DO NOT SEE THIS AS AN EMAIL ADDRESS!  It will work exactly like the original address, but it has been converted into character codes that the harvesters cannot recognize.  This is a powerful, free technique that anyone can use, unless you actually enjoy getting emails for growth hormones, plastic inserts, or magic creams.

KingCart is still our personal choice for merchants who do not want to host their own. More features than we have room to list here, but the most outstanding is the LIVE links to UPS and FedEx for shipping pricing, including your user defined markup! NO upfront costs, dirt-cheap pricing, and complete integration with Transaction Central.  Take a look at the MerchantAnywhere product store, it's the one WE use.

ORDER FREE MERCHANT MATERIALS HERE!!!

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