[Geoip-general] Using Geolocation to prevent credit card fraud

[TJ M. <tjm...@ma...>]

The purpose of the e-mail is to publish in a public forum a method of 
preventing credit card fraud using Geolocation, anonymous proxy, e-mail 
domain, and bank identification number databases.

The method rates possible credit card transactions on the likelihood that 
they are fraudulent.  It takes the following as inputs:

    # Client IP Address
    # Billing City/State/ZipCode/Country
    # Bank Identification Number (first 4-6 numbers of credit card number)
    # E-mail domain (e.g. hotmail.com, aol.com) 

And outputs:

    # IP Address Location
    # Distance from IP address to Billing Location
    # Whether e-mail is from free e-mail provider
    # Whether IP address is Anonymous Proxy
    # Whether IP address country matches Billing country
    # Credit Card Issuing Bank Country
    # Whether IP address country matches bank country
    # Overall Fraud Score based on above outputs

It uses a database of IP address to city mappings, a database of free
e-mail domains, a database of bank identification number locations, and a 
database of anonymous proxies.

-TJ

P.S. The purpose of this e-mail is to release this idea into the public 
domain, provide prior art, and to protect anybody who implements this
service from patent infringement suits.  In other words, an "Anti-Patent".