It might look to you that the bank just takes the charge of no questions asked, but as soon as your stepdad leaves the bank, the CC company will make sure they get their money from the merchant.
Bottomline is, the merchant pays if they can't proof a purchase was made. And even if they can proof it, a merchant will do a return to prevent him/herself from the chargeback fee that the bank will charge them if the customer complains with their credit card issuer.
[shameless plug]
Merchants who are currently experiencing a high fraud rate might want to take a look at CyberCash's FraudPatrol Internet fraud detection service: http://www.cybercash.com/fraudpatrol/ [/shameless plug]
The encryption used is a slightly modified 3des encryption. It is not a tunnel. The data is encrypted at the merchant's end and decrypted at CyberCash and vice versa of course;-) The client software is available for quite some UNIX flavors, so that should not be a problem. Furthermore, CyberCash acts as a gateway to the credit card processor. This means that you'll need an E-commerce enabled merchant account to process transactions using CyberCash.
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It might look to you that the bank just takes the charge of no questions asked, but as soon as your stepdad leaves the bank, the CC company will make sure they get their money from the merchant.
Bottomline is, the merchant pays if they can't proof a purchase was made. And even if they can proof it, a merchant will do a return to prevent him/herself from the chargeback fee that the bank will charge them if the customer complains with their credit card issuer.
[shameless plug]
Merchants who are currently experiencing a high fraud rate might want to take a look at CyberCash's FraudPatrol Internet fraud detection service: http://www.cybercash.com/fraudpatrol/
[/shameless plug]
The encryption used is a slightly modified 3des encryption. It is not a tunnel. The data is encrypted at the merchant's end and decrypted at CyberCash and vice versa of course ;-) The client software is available for quite some UNIX flavors, so that should not be a problem. Furthermore, CyberCash acts as a gateway to the credit card processor. This means that you'll need an E-commerce enabled merchant account to process transactions using CyberCash.