With the rapidly increasing amount of credit card fraud and identity theft, like most e-Commmerce retailers we have had to continually ratchet up the verification bar on our automated credit card processing system. It has reduced the fraudulent use attempts, but has also created problems for some overseas customers who have been unable, for whatever reason, to satisfy the automated address verification checking when using a credit card. Our normal recommendation is for them to set up a Paypal account which is normally a bit more forgiving and they do not have to share any credit card information with us.

Since we started our online store we have accepted telephone and FAX transmission of credit card information in addition to the online processing. We have always advised customers not to send us order and credit card information via email as being insecure.

We have just added a new feature to accept secure information from our more intrepid customers including credit card information using encrypted email. I am publishing the public encryption keys for both the eStore email address as well as for the blog address. You may also obtain these from a keyserver such as the MIT Keyserver or the OpenPGP Keyserver.
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