Without AVS, stolen or fraudulent manufactured cards can be used to purchase your products and services. When the cardholder finds out, they charge back and the amount is deducted from your merchant account. With AVS, you have a much better chance of the purchaser being the legitimate card holder.
Customers have the option of omitting their billing street address when they order.
We feel this is a good compromise between security and anonymity. AVS, as it implies, uses billing address information entered by the customer at the time of purchase to verify against the billing address on file with the card issuer for the cardholder. Your account with Verisign or Authorize.net most likely already has this feature turned on. As SafShop discovers stolen credit cards, the credit card number is entered into a data base. This data base is then used as a validation point at time of order to verify that the credit card number being used is not a stolen credit card.