The gas station can be a popular first stop for credit card fraudsters. At outdoor pay-at-the-pump stations, criminals can test stolen or counterfeit cards without the risk of facing an employee.
Enter Visa Transaction Advisor. Visa's game-changing technology is the newest and one of the most powerful tools against fraud at the gas pump. In the more than 35,000 stations using the service, Visa Transaction Advisor has been able to reduce fraud by more than half—a 54 percent decline in counterfeit fraud rates and a 51 percent decline in lost and stolen fraud chargeback rates.
So what is Visa Transaction Advisor and how does it work? It is a service that extends the power of Visa’s global risk intelligence to fuel merchants. Each time a credit or debit card is inserted at the pump, Visa analyzes more than 500 pieces of data about the cardholder's account and global fraud trends. Within milliseconds, the tool determines the risk of the transaction and provides a risk score that helps merchants identify transactions with a higher risk of fraud (so they can request additional authentication before gas is pumped). Research shows that when prompted to go inside a store to complete a transaction, most criminals will drive away instead. In other words, Visa Transaction Advisor stops criminals before they can even pick up the pump. The service is easy to implement as well. It uses existing pump hardware and software, and it’s usually implemented at the national-brand level, so most franchise owners do not need to do anything at all to use it.
“Visa Transaction Advisor was easy to implement. We were able to set up the service quickly, using existing infrastructure, and saw immediate results,” said Gabriel Andres Porras, merchant acquiring manager for Chevron. “This tool is helping to protect our business from fraudsters at more than 8,000 retail locations across the U.S.”
The U.S. migration to EMV chip technology (which generates a one-time code that is virtually impossible to duplicate when a card is used in-store at a chip-activated terminal) is underway, but fuel merchants have additional time to implement chip readers at fuel pumps. In the meantime, Visa Transaction Advisor can have a major impact
on fraud at the pump.
“The results we’re seeing in the fuel sector attest to the power of predictive analytics and the value of data-sharing with our merchant partners,” said Mark Nelsen, Visa’s senior vice president of Risk Products and Business Intelligence. “It’s an effective model for combatting fraud and one we hope to replicate with other merchant categories.”