You want to set up a payment wallet on Amazon or other online stores, and it requested for the “name on card”.
How important is this to the seller?
Why will they be particular about it?
You’ll surely be interested to find out in this post.
What is the term “Name On Card”
This is also known as Cardholder’s name.
This name is often printed on the card’s front.
It is the person’s name, just as it appears on the card.
The name of the cardholder identifies the person who has been permitted to use the card.
That person may have essentially given the approval to spend from the file as an “authorized client,” even though they didn’t access it.
Debit or credit cards can only be used by approved cardholders.
Different ways the name on the card is important to merchants:
- The cardholder name helps online sellers to locate the account the customer uses to pay.
- There’s a system put in place to detect fraud. This system examines the name field to see if it matches the card holder’s name.
- It saves the cardholder’s name so that if they contact to cancel or dispute a charge, their name will be on file, even if the account name is different.
- If the cardholder’s name differs from the name on the account, it can be used as a possible indicator of the customer’s legal name.
While using systems that check the name on the card when ordering online, if the cardholder name doesn’t really match but everything else does, your order will either be processed automatically or directed to the fraud department for verification.
If the account is sent for review, they will manually look at it and find that the AVS failed due to a mismatch in the name.
If they like anything else they see, they’ll often approve the account manually without your help.
Some systems can detect and flag vulnerable accounts when the same card is used several times at a merchant but the name entered for the card changes.
Perhaps, somebody might steal a credit card and then try to open new accounts with the same card.
Internal fraud detection or the third-party system often makes use of this approach.
Here is a practical scenario:
A man pays an internet bill for his wife, but the account is in her name.
The man could reach out to the company and inform them that his credit card is being used for recurring billing and that they must cease using it.
He has a solid claim to have the card deleted from the account because his name is on file as the cardholder in the merchant’s system and he knows the card number.
(Depending on the merchant’s rules, he may still be unable to make any changes to the account, but he should be able to delete his card.)
If someone uses the same card number and cardholder name to open several accounts with different names, it will be flagged as well.
To detect fraud, the cardholder’s name is combined with other data such as the IP address, card number, AVS verification status, geolocation, and so on.
Multiple individuals can have the same name, so it is not often used as a stand-alone indicator.
The cardholder’s name can be used to look for and potentially identify accounts with other suspicious indicators.
We’ve highlighted different ways the cardholder’s name is important, just as other details needed are of equal importance when ordering online.
How it is used highly depends on the fraud detection system put in place by the merchant you are ordering from, and whether or not a particular card type checks the name of the cardholder.