Many of you will now know that a lot of companies that accept credit cards require you to use your billing address as the delivery address. But how do they know that?
It's called the Address Verificaiton Service (AVS). AVS is an indiciator flag, and the bank will often approve a transaction even if the address does not match and leave the decision of whether to accept the card to the merchant themselves.
The AVS flag is split into two values - the address and the postcode. There are traditionally 3 possible outcomes to each check, although certain Merchant providers may have more:
- Matched
- Not Matched
- Not Supported
Some banks will provide AVS responses even when the card declines. Only certain merchant providers will pass this information on though. Barclays Merchant Services for example do, while HSBC ePayments doesn't.
AVS was designed to run from PDQ (Pretty Damn Quick) machines - i.e. terminals rather than from a computer, and therefore it's designed just to check the NUMBERS of an address, not the whole address. This is a very important concept to understand for both customers trying to get a successful AVS and merchants deciding on fraud risk.
For example an address of
1 John Street
Manchester
M1 1AA
Would pass an AVS check if the billing address was
1 Mary Street
Glasgow
G1 1BB
As the Address numbers are "1" for both and the postcode numbers are "11" for both. This is clearly not the correct address though. Never rely on the AVS check as a full-proof anti-fraud measure.
To a customer, particularly Scottish customers, it's also helpful to know that the order of the numbers is also important. You see this when dealing with buildings with flats.
1/1 50 George Street
Glasgow
G1 1AA
Depending on the postcode lookup software being used this may have come out on the form as
50 George Street
Flat 1/1
Glasgow
G1 1AA
Simply swapping lines 1 and 2 would result in a successful match. Also important is when you have a building name. I have seen numerous examples where Postcode software inserts house numbers where they're never used. For example, your bank statement might be:
101 Manchester Towers
Manchester Road
Manchester
M1 1AA
But when you look up your postcode on a website it may come up
101 Manchester Towers
50 Manchester Road
Manchester
M1 1AA
Notice the 50. Simply remove this and you will receive a successful AVS.
Footnote
American Express is as usual different and has some more sophisticated checks as well as AVS.