Wasnt there something years back about merchants refusing to ship to addresses not associated with the payment method? Why would you ship something to midwest after being paid by the card registered to CA resident?
You make a business decision on how likely it is to be legitimate and, based on the margin profile of the business, whether you want to prioritize for conversions or for not being defrauded. Avoiding $10k of legit sales to save $1k of fraud is very plausibly not a winning strategy.
People do subjectively weird things, all the time at Internet scales.
Here’s a very real example: Amazon account opened in 1996 from Illinois. Credit card billing address in Chicago. Has never purchased electronics or anything over $200. Almost dormant for several years. 2007 rolls around and the account is accessed from a novel IP address in Nagoya and buys a $2k laptop for a person with an unrelated name living in Ohio.
Place your bets: was this transaction fraud?
No, it was not. I bought that laptop, on behalf of a coworker, an Indian woman working with me in Nagoya who had no credit card and no U.S. banking relationship. She had a member of her extended family, living in the U.S., and wanted to buy them a laptop to celebrate their entrance into University. She gave me physical yen for the laptop.
Impressively, IMHO, Amazon let this transaction go through without stopping me, though I was on pins and needles (and told her as much). I assumed this would trip every possible flag, and (as a Japanese salaryman) $2k was a lot of money to both of us.
Anecdotally Amazon seems to be more loose with accepting money than say eBay.
I've had multiple occasions where my Amazon purchases should have thrown red flags - mixed up Amazon accounts, wrong ip, wrong country, wrong name and it still went through.
-Students studying in a different city/state for college but keeping their parent's home for billing purposes
-Recent relocation
-Staying with friends/family for a few weeks around holidays
etc..
Tons of valid reasons. Of course you reduce fraud as a merchant if you do that, but you also reduce your sales by quite a significant amount (and anger your customers), sometimes it's just not worth it.
here I am staying at my grandparents house for the weekend and I have decided to send something to them they will just love!
Oh here I am moved to Kansas in my new company provided house as part of relocation, but there are still somethings we need here I can see that already I will just pay for it with my CA card because I haven't got a new local one yet.
Obviously all these are edge cases but probably so are all those problems with paypal, google, amazon cancelling some customer's stuff and we get all upset about it here. So cancelling something because it looks suspicious is pretty unfair to people who haven't done anything wrong.
Wasnt there something years back about merchants refusing to ship to addresses not associated with the payment method? Why would you ship something to midwest after being paid by the card registered to CA resident?