Address Verification

AVS is a service to combat fraudulent activity for non-face-to-face transactions by cross-referencing the cardholder’s address information with the card issuer’s records.^[2] AVS is widely supported by Visa, MasterCard and American Express in the USA, Canada and United Kingdom.

Cardholders with a bank that does not support AVS may receive an error from Internet stores due to the lack of data.

Besides the automated verification, some banks do provide merchants with a manual verification system. Usually this is done for foreign credit card accounts as the AVS only works in the same country. This facility helps the merchants to prevent fraud arising from other countries. The merchant's bank calls the customer banks (or send a fax for banks that request them). Some countries like Denmark however prevent banks from verifying customer data.