TECH TIP

Suspicious Card Activity Settings

Some of the many settings that the Account Administrator controls are the various security and fraud settings within $ $ $ ON THE NET, including the Suspicious Card Usage settings, part of Shift4's Fraud Sentry tool, which are located on the Account Settings screen. These settings are designed to let every merchant decide what levels of activity (number of times a card is used, amount charged to single card, etc.) are inappropriate for their individual business model.

The Administrator sets the usage thresholds and, as with the other settings within Fraud Sentry, these "checks" are made during the batch settlement.  This prevents them from slowing down authorizations to search through the database and helps avoid a situation where too strict of a setting may prevent a valid transaction from being processed. 

The first setting that you will notice is the "Enforcement Method".  This identifies what type of action the system should take when one of the defined criteria is met during a batch settlement.  When set to "Silent" nothing happens that the user submitting the batch will be aware of.  "Verbose" provides a detailed listing of the transactions causing a problem and will allow the user to stop the batch process or continue with it by use of a password.  Finally, "Disallow" will prevent the user from submitting the batch with the violating transactions in the batch.  Most merchants find the "Verbose" fits their needs best.  In all cases, emails are sent to the addresses designated during your initial setup as fraud notification recipients and those entered under "Fraud Sentry Notifications".

The remainder of the settings can be broken down into three different categories of transactions: Sales, Credits, and Voids.  If you want to be made aware of activity for one of these types of transactions, then you would create settings in the appropriate area.  Each category is then broken down a little more to allow you to group transactions into smaller pools to be monitored.  You can designate by clerk¹, by merchant, or across all merchants.

Once you know what type of transactions you want to focus on and the area that you want to be monitoring for these events, you can then narrow down exactly what you are looking for by designating either a transaction or amount threshold for a specific date range.  To give you an idea of how this works here are a couple of exaples and how you would configure the system:

SCENARIO:  You would like to be alerted when a card is used to purchase goods more than 30 times across all locations in a one week period.