What You Need To Know About Card Safety
Card Embossing and Laser Print
Be suspicious if the card number is not embossed and raised or the laser printed portion appears unusual or is an uneven type or style. This is unusual and may indicate that the card is counterfeit. Refuse to do the transaction and call your Authorisation Centre for instructions.
Chip Cards
Chip cards are intended to prevent fraud and must be dipped into your POS chip slot to ensure the transaction data is captured on the chip. Never swipe or force a chip card through a POS terminal to process a fallback to a magnetic stripe transaction. Avoid manual imprinted transactions with embossed chip cards. When a chip is damaged, avoid high risk, high value swiped fallback to magstripe transactions - the chip may have been damaged with the intent to defraud.
Cloned Chip Cards
If no chip can be seen, yet your POS card terminal shows that the card is a chip card, this indicates that the card is a cloned chip card. This means that the magnetic stripe on the card was cloned and contains data from an original genuine chip card. When this card is ‘dipped’ into your terminal, the terminal will not be able to complete the transaction. Never proceed witha forced fallback to a magstripe transaction. Never use your override facility to force such a transaction. Always beware of foreign non chip cards and request proof of identity.
Maestro/ VISA Classic Debit Cards
Debit card transactions are always PIN authenticated. When a MAESTRO or VISA debit card does not require a PIN, consider this suspicious. This may indicate that the card has been cloned with a credit card number and not a debit card number (this is captured on the magnetic stripe). Refuse to do the transaction if the POS terminal does not require a PIN. Refuse to do the transaction if the card numbers on the card face and the electronic slip are not the same. Don’t allow transactions to be split to take advantage of a floor limit.
Pin Protection
There is no need to ever ‘dip’ a card. Every transaction should just be a tap which, depending on the transaction amount, may require a PIN. A PIN number is an added security feature of Chip and PIN debit cards. To complete transactions with Chip and PIN debit cards, the PIN number must be entered on the POS terminal. Be aware of observers who attempt to observea cardholder entering their PIN number. Always advise the customers to block the PIN pad when the PIN is entered into the POS terminal.
Card Not Present (CNP) Transactions
CNP transactions are only allowed when your merchant agreement provides for this. Should your agreement not allowCNP transactions, your business will lose out on the transaction amount. For online CNP transactions, additional security measures from MasterCard Securecode or VISA – Visa Secure are available to protect customers and merchants against online CNP fraud. Online merchants and card clients should enquire from their respective banks how to enrol in the above- mentioned programs. (Customers will feel more secure and will be more likely to purchase from protected businesses). If your merchant agreement does not allow CNP transactions, it means that the cardholder and card must be present when the transaction is made.
CARD SKIMMING
Card skimming to create cloned cards is still prevalent.
Skimming is a tactic where criminals deceitfully obtain the magstripe information on a legitimate credit card and transfer it to a cloned card, which is later used fraudulently. The legitimate card and the cloned card copy are electronically indistinguishable.
Typically, a collusive employee accepts a card from a non-suspecting card holder, processes the correct transaction but also performs an additional swipe through a skimmer which the employee later hands over to the criminal.
The criminal then uses the captured data on the skimmer to create false cloned cards. A skimmer can be as small as a lighter or smaller and can easily be hidden under a jacket or something similar. Business owners are requested to take special care when employing staff who have not been carefully screened and whose references are not from known and trusted sources.
Skimming that takes place on your business premises is a high reputational risk to you and your business.
FINANCIAL RISK
Always refer to the merchant agreement! High levels of fraud may result in the termination of the merchant agreement and the retraction of card POS terminals.
Ensure that you monitor your revenue (volumes and values) in order to identify unexpected and abnormal transactional behaviour. Abnormal transactions may indicate that fraud has taken place.
Never process a refund to any card other than the original card presented for the purchase.
Report suspicious transactional behaviour to your bank for investigation. Monitor and report charge-back disputes as well as fraud.
