For years, we allowed customers to use a “guest checkout” feature on our website. This allowed you to check out without having to create an account.
And then the scammers showed up.
I would come into the office, usually on a Monday morning, and find that hackers had placed hundreds of false orders on our website. They had no interest in irrigation or manure equipment.
They were using our website to test stolen credit cards to see which ones worked. Then they went to Amazon, or Walmart, or somewhere else to buy the stuff they really wanted.
We improved our reCAPTCHA (which square contains a bicycle), but hackers figured out how to bypass this requirement.
I was left with the task of deleting hundreds of non-approved orders AFTER I copied the IP address of the order (one at a time) and entered it into our Security software to keep them from coming back and trying it again with a new batch of credit cards. This blocked the IP address they were using.
But that did little to stop the flow; they simply routed the false orders through new IP addresses and started the process over again.
We quickly discovered there were some countries that never placed legitimate orders, so we red-flagged these countries and set up our security so we simply do not take orders from Pakistan, Iran, Russia, North Korea, etc. – the list is over 100 countries.
That left us with the United States, Canada, and Mexico, where 99.9% of our sales come from. But there were still problems.
Currently, there are 1,531,595,163 IP addresses assigned to the United States, so they have plenty of IP addresses to choose from.
As a last resort, we had to change the order flow to require you to enter your email address before you could place an order. I understand what a pain this is, but in order to get your receipt and shipment tracking information sent to you, you would have to do this anyway. We simply ask you to now enter it before you start the order.
In a perfect world, this would not be necessary, but alas this is the world we live in.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
