Online credit card security method

Abstract

A method is presented for handling on-line-issued credit cards differently the first time the credit card is used at an e-commerce web site. The method examines all credit cards used in transactions on the web site. If the credit card is determined to be one that has been issued on-line (or issued in another high-risk manner), the method will determine whether this is the first time the credit card has been used at the web site. If so, the system will institute a delay of approximately four hours in the transaction to allow a more complete fraud analysis to be undertaken. One technique for determining whether the credit card has been issued in a high-risk manner is to assign all credit cards issued in such a manner a card number within a predefined range of numbers. All that is then necessary to make the determination is to determine whether the credit card being used in a transaction is within that range of numbers.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.