We have seen a rise in fraud using stolen or unauthorized credit cards to make purchases and we are making some adjustments to how we handle new orders. This will not apply to our longstanding customers but for new customers we will not ship to a separate shipping address. Orders will ship only to the billing address.
On new international orders we will now require payment by Postal Money Order. In addition we may request photo ID. We are implementing these new rules because we have no way to verify that a credit card used to make a purchase is authorized by the credit card owner. If we process the order and it turns out to be fraud we are out both money and product. Chargebacks to our account generally do not appear until weeks after an order has shipped. At that point there is very little we can do. We hate to add these restrictions as it causes undue delays and inconvenience to our honest customers, but as you can guess not all of our customers have turned out to be who they claim.
At this time we are not going to require all customers to send us photo IDs prior to making a purchase, but in certain cases where we need to verify that the purchaser is legitimate we may ask for proof if ID.
If you have any questions about this new policy, we will be happy to discuss them with you.
