Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Online Donation facility for Ugandan Orphans available again
Some of you may have noticed that the donation facility for our school fees sponsorship in Uganda went missing for a couple of weeks.
Unfortunately a rush of dubious credit card payments obliged us to take some fairly forthright action with our secure transaction handlers at Worldpay to defend ourselves against a rush of credit card faud testing emanating out of the far east. Despicable although it may be, fraudsters tend to focus on charitable donations online as a means to test cloned or stolen cards before launching into purchases of actual goods where address data is likely to be manually checked by merchants and their fulfillment partners. Happily it seems we had chosen the right secure payment handlers in 2000 when we first opened online and until recently we had experienced only a handful of attempts to de-fraud in six years.
The ability to identify individual IP addresses behind purchases via Worldpay has allowed us to re-construct our defences and also do our bit towards directing the authorities to specific locations where fraud may originate. None of this process has affected in any way our normal day to day business with genuine customers, but it did mean we had to remove the donation facility for a while whilst we put measures into place.
Happily we have been able to re-instate the donations facility today and we hope online customers will be able to "catch up" with our customers on our outdoor event bars with their donations. The remarkable generosity of some online customers and many face-to-face customers means that we are now almost 60% to our first target to pay the fees for 95 orphans this September. We are hoping to be able to send these funds to Uganda by the end of June.
You can donate your own £13 at any time at this link. Donate here!
Unfortunately a rush of dubious credit card payments obliged us to take some fairly forthright action with our secure transaction handlers at Worldpay to defend ourselves against a rush of credit card faud testing emanating out of the far east. Despicable although it may be, fraudsters tend to focus on charitable donations online as a means to test cloned or stolen cards before launching into purchases of actual goods where address data is likely to be manually checked by merchants and their fulfillment partners. Happily it seems we had chosen the right secure payment handlers in 2000 when we first opened online and until recently we had experienced only a handful of attempts to de-fraud in six years.
The ability to identify individual IP addresses behind purchases via Worldpay has allowed us to re-construct our defences and also do our bit towards directing the authorities to specific locations where fraud may originate. None of this process has affected in any way our normal day to day business with genuine customers, but it did mean we had to remove the donation facility for a while whilst we put measures into place.
Happily we have been able to re-instate the donations facility today and we hope online customers will be able to "catch up" with our customers on our outdoor event bars with their donations. The remarkable generosity of some online customers and many face-to-face customers means that we are now almost 60% to our first target to pay the fees for 95 orphans this September. We are hoping to be able to send these funds to Uganda by the end of June.
You can donate your own £13 at any time at this link. Donate here!
# posted by Charles Massey @ 12:21 pm 
