By Ben Decruz

With the credit card system tight, security is a must. This becomes the responsibility of the company that provides you with the credit card to ensure proper security. This end has been achieved through an Address Verification System. Though this system is yet not available in all the countries, it has the potential. This system verifies your billing address and compares it with the address provided to the card company.

There is not just one thing to keep the credit card safe. There are other features as well. Card Security Code and expiry date on the back of the card are the other tools that can avoid scam and will help you to get the better security with the card. One must make sure that he not only verifies address, but also uses the other two features to ensure the credibility of the credit card.

Like all other man made systems, address verification system can falter. It does so when there is a conflict the data and the program's intelligence. In such rare cases, there has to be a manual alternative to the system.

As the system check for numeric values only and there might be additional digits in the home addresses at times. These might be the flat numbers etc. The address verification system will not always behave in the same way. Sometimes it will check for these extra digits and sometimes it won't cause problems for such an address.

Currently the address verification system is not that common in all the countries of the world and only a few support it. The problem is often faced when people want to make purchases from an online store that requires address verification before allowing the purchase. Such stores can return negative reports due too lack of data available when ordering. This has been solved by a few companies as they do provide the manual verification instead of the AVS. This can be only done for foreign cards as the address verification system will only work within the same country.

The cards can also be declined if there are verification errors. When this happens the funds that are attached to the transaction are put on hold and the amount that is shown during such period is the amount that remains after subtracting the amount on hold. This can cause inconvenience and the card holder might get into some trouble with his other transactions.

One must understand that the address verification system is not a fool proof system and it needs the cooperation of both the merchant and the card holder. It is still a work in progress and it is not used world wide, but it has the potential and the features to become a world wide system.

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