What is card testing

Card testing is a type of fraudulent activity where someone buys a list of stolen cards, and then attempts to validate or make purchases with those cards (on your website) to determine which cards are still valid.

This has many negative impacts for you (as a website owner / holder of a merchant account).

• Disputes—card testing usually involve payments, some of which succeed. Customers notice successful payments and report them as fraud, which will result in disputes that cost you time and money.
• Higher decline rates—Card testing usually causes a large number of declines to be associated with your business. A high decline rate damages the reputation of your business with card issuers and card networks, which makes all of your transactions appear riskier. This can result in an increased decline rate for legitimate payments, even after card testing stops.
• Additional fees—Card testing activity can result in additional fees, such as gateway fees and dispute fees.

What can you do to help prevent card testing

1. Get your developer to Install "I am not a robot" captchas.  
2. Talk to your payment gateway about what fraud rules you can setup.  An example is :  If you do not accept orders from overseas, one very good thing to do is "block all overseas cards".  Please note before turning turning on additional Fraud settings, please contact us first.

Which Payment Gateway do you use? Learn more ...

If you use Stripe - you can learn more about Fraud Prevention tools here.

If you use eWay -  you can learn more about Fraud Prevention Tools here