Company: CardCops.com
Product: Merchant Alarm

It's getting tougher and more expensive for high-risk merchants to process payments they receive from the customers with whom they do business. These merchants face more stringent card Association regulations, higher fees and difficulty finding companies willing to process transactions for them.

Not all high-risk merchants are bad apples, and the good eggs among them now have a means of combating the challenges they collectively face.

CardCops, a company whose stated mission is "getting compromised credit card and personal information data into the hands of American consumers and helping global Internet merchants reduce online fraud," has added two new features to its Merchant Alarm database.

The database's expanded capabilities are designed to improve the ways high-risk merchants reduce chargeback rates and keep them below the levels preferred by the card Associations.

Using Merchant Alarm, merchants can collectively contribute to and scrub transactions against a database from private groups such as ISOs or e-commerce vertical markets.

When ISOs and groups of merchants have access to and can share negative data, there is a higher probability of catching a fraudulent order or a crook targeting a specific industry.

Many times, a fraudulent transaction is not identified at the time the transaction occurs, but can take days or weeks to become evident. The other improvement to Merchant Alarm is a card monitoring service, available exclusively to database subscribers.

This feature automatically notifies merchants of fraudulent activity on a previously approved transaction. CardCops monitors the card for 30 days or longer, helping prevent fraudulent orders, chargebacks on back orders and losses in recurring billing

CardCops gathers data on compromised credit cards from its proprietary "bot," which scans the Internet, including newsgroups, search engines and chat rooms for card and personally identifiable information.

CardCops also obtains compromised card data from its participating merchants as well as consumers, the underground via an amnesty program and an anonymous disclosure program.

CardCops.com
P.O. Box 9088
Canoga Park, Calif. 91309
310-593-1494
www.cardcops.com