FastSpring and Credit Card Fraud

A few weeks ago, someone tried to buy Poker Copilot with a credit card. FastSpring, my payment processor, declined the transaction. A couple of minutes later, someone else tried to buy Poker Copilot with a credit card, and FastSpring also declined that transaction.

What did these two attempted purchases have in common, apart from both being declined? The same IP address. In non-tech talk, that means both attempted purchases came from the same computer (or, perhaps, the same computer network).

Over the next 15 minutes or so there were several more attempts from the same IP address to purchase Poker Copilot with a range of different credit cards and names. It was suspicious, FastSpring detected this, and stopped the seemingly fraudulent sales from going through.

This illustrates an important reason to use a solid payment processor for online sales. Rolling good fraud protection yourself is simply too hard. And yet when you do all your business online you need good fraud protection.