I get that you're referencing the cash part of the transaction but the card companies still have to maintain code that detects fraud early, hire staff to support customers and investigate fraudulent transactions. That's not 0 cost to them.
In addition to sticking me with the bag for every online fraudulent transaction, they also levy an additional fee, which I assume offsets some or all of that cost. In fact, if it was a low-end purchase, they may make more on the chargeback fee than the original purchase.
I see no evidence of "code that detects fraud early", at least for online transactions. Any merchants ever get a call from a cc company, or issuing bank saying "hey, you know that transaction we approved a few days ago? you might not want to ship that." ? Nope.
But one other thing. Did you ever notice that there is no feedback loop where you can inform the issuer or bank that you have discovered a fraudulent charge? For what we do it's easy to spot a fraud charge. We void (or credit it) and move on (still a big pain of course). But the thing is there is no way to alert the credit card company (manually in some way or even by email) that we have figured out a card is stolen. Otoh, as a card user I've received calls from my bank from time to time when a particular purchase doesn't fit a pattern (and that pattern has never caught any fraud, only purchases that I have made).
Great point. I end up just refunding the ones I find. In many cases I can tell 100% it's fraud, but there's nobody to tell.
EDIT: some of these providers are either directly operated by or have very tight relations with cc networks so they do have access to enormous amount of data which they use to make their risk management decisions.
EDIT #2: at a risk of sounding like an ad - one example would be Cybersource who is owned by Visa.
Helps a little, but they are, of course, still dealing with a tiny fraction of the available data out there, and the cost is pretty high.
For small to medium sized players you're much better off just doing what you can with AVS, CVV2 match codes, known freight-forwarder addresses, ip geolocation, etc. That's all free other than a bit of dev time.
It's just a shame that the kind of improvements that could be made with access to data only the CC companies and issuing banks have aren't ever going to happen.
Who is that? There's a couple operated by credit reporting services, which is not the same thing at all.
They definitely do do this. But when they see a likely-fraudulent transaction, they call the cardholder, not the merchant. I have received calls of this type.
Right. Which means the item gets shipped. Because...yep.
Edits: a) In the real world, the bank does not catch these things in between auth/capture. b) 3rd party companies are limited in what they can do. They don't have the full picture.
But again the banks are not in business of protecting the merchant. There are companies that are in that business however and as a merchant you have an option to use their services.