The incidence of fraud perpetrated by online merchants against consumers is fairly rare – how would they get away with it?
Consumers are typically only liable for the first $50 of any fraudulent transaction, and even this liability is often waived by the credit card issuers. On the other hand, credit card fraud can be important depending upon the online merchant. We’ve had a lot of problems from people using stolen cards and we ourselves must be extremely cautious in dealing with the public knowing that we the merchants are liable for 100% of any loss incurred by the greedy banks. Significant losses are incurred by merchants – especially sellers of digitally delivered products. For digitally delivered goods, there is no time to check out the validity of the information provided by the customer, and the e-mail identity and address may be as fraudulent as the credit card number.
