Many transactions are now made between a purchaser and a supplier of goods and services without actual cash passing to the supplier. Such transactions particularly apply to purchases made by phone orders or over the Internet system. Payment is then commonly made by means of the purchaser's credit card, the details of which are used by the supplier to be credited with the purchase price of the article. This credit is made available by the merchant code supplier which issued the credit card.
The details required to effect a purchase in this way include inter alia the credit card number, the name of the owner of the card and the card's expiry date. This information when transmitted verbally by phone, or by entry onto a web page of the internet, is then substantially beyond the control of the owner of the card and he or she is at risk of fraudulent use of the information, either for unauthorised use of the funds represented by the card, or the establishment of a bogus identity for the purpose of fraud. Transmission of the credit card details over a public computer network such as the internet also involves the additional risk of interception of those details by a third party. The consequences of such misuse of the information can be serious for the card holder, the merchant and the merchant code supplier.
It is an object of the present invention to address or at least ameliorate some of the above disadvantages.