Real-time address verification saving costs and helping to reduce fraud
Data quality software provider Melissa Data has in the past six months seen a significant increase in interest in its hosted phone and address verification service among web merchants, the company tells Internet Retailer. The real-time service lets the merchants verify directly from the web site or call center that shipping or billing information supplied with an order is correct, which not only saves the merchant fees charged by carriers to make address corrections in the field, but also does double duty as a red flag for potential fraud.
Phone numbers and addresses that don’t match up are a key indicator in fraud detection, notes the company, which has built the service around a sophisticated set of matrices that reconcile area codes, prefixes and phone numbers with each other as well as with numbers on record, and physical addresses get the same scrutiny. The system can detect address elements that are incorrect or suspect, such as a street number not matching a real street name or a non-existent street name supplied for a city.
The parameters for invalid information can be user-set, based on current real-world phone and address information fed into the live service and regularly updated. An Internet merchant might ask the system to flag as possible fraud, for example, any order or query that supplies a phone number that is more than 100 miles away from the supplied address.
“Our service enables the merchant to make sure they’ve got a valid address upfront at the time they get an order,” says marketing manager Jack Shember.
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