There has been an explosion in the frequency of fraud on the Internet but we are here to tell you that you don't have to become a victim of it!

Don't kid yourself, if you operate a web business you will be confronted with fraud attempts. Some merchants are more at risk than others because of the type of merchandise they sell. Hosting companies and people who sell data based products are favorite targets as well as people who sell expensive products that can be easily resold by the criminal.

Regardless of what you bring to market, thieves will try to steal from you. However, theft is not a new concept and like the millions of merchants before you, you should expect and accept this risk as part of doing business.

Does this mean you have to accept profit losses to fraud? No way! It simply means that you need to be constantly vigilant and have an active anti-fraud procedure in place to protect yourself.

I can author this code and provide the domain with hosting but I can not possibly fight Internet fraud by myself.

It is going to take a team effort and I need your help! What can you do? Start by visiting the first thread in our forum, Welcome to the Crusade, for a simple list of things that everyone can do to stop Internet fraud in its tracks.

Fraud is rampant because victims are plentiful. More merchants knowing how to protect themselves will help all of us by making fraud more difficult for criminals. If you know a person who does business on the web, tell them about this site!

The first step in preventing fraud is gaining the knowledge you need to do so and friend, you have come to the right place!

Combatfraud.org revolves around the Forum we have in place to share information. Feel free to gather knowledge from it or post knowledge to it if you can, indeed, that is this sites primary reason for existence. This page serves as a guide to our forum in order to point out areas of interest.

I know your here for the straight facts on how to protect yourself so lets get down to business!

Step one is knowing your enemies and allies. The Where fraud comes from forum discusses Worst offenders and Why. After that, read the Who will help you forum to see what you can expect in the way of help from your merchant provider, the credit card companies and the law.

Step two is locking those who would steal from you out of your site before they can even place an order! Our Using .htaccess forum explains how to do just that. Be sure to start at the What is the .htaccces file? so you know what you are doing and then apply either the Basic deny list or the Advanced deny list that we provide.

Step three is working out your own fraud screening procedure. There are a lot of things to consider here and no single procedure will work for everyone. Our How to combat fraud forum discusses not only our Standard procedure but also Securing your cart, Gateway processing, AVS & CVV and maybe most importantly, How to lookup IPs and mail server origins.