Are you keeping your business secure? Take this quiz!

[Kpay]

Hi everyone,

Take this quiz to make sure you're taking the steps to protect your business. After you give it a whirl, check your answers in the comments below. 

Good luck!

[Kpay · Accepted solution]

Thanks for taking the quiz! Check out the key below to see how you did and let us know if anything surprised you or if you’d like more info on anything mentioned here.

Answer Key:

1. How can you protect bad actors from accessing or taking over your account?
1. D) All of the above. We’ll keep your data safe and encrypted, but it’s up to you to keep fraudsters from getting ahold of your login and password. We strongly suggest following our best practices for keeping your account credentials safe, such as setting up 2-Step Verification.
2. As a Square Seller, how often do you encrypt your customer’s card and personal information? Encryption means translating information into a special code so that only those with a special key can read it.
1. A) I encrypt every sale. Every time you take a payment with Square, your customer’s payment data is safely disguised using our encryption. This means hackers can’t read your data.
3. If a customer disputes a charge and initiates a chargeback, how many hours should you be prepared to spend trying to resolve the dispute on your own?
1. D) Less than an hour. No need to spend hours on the phone with your customer’s bank. We’ll send you an email to tell you what you need to contest the dispute. Submit your information via the Disputes Dashboard and we’ll take care of the rest.
4. Which of the following best explains what happens if a customer pays with a stolen or fraudulent card?
1. C) If a payment looks suspicious, Square’s fraud team will reach out for additional information about the buyer. If our fraud detection algorithms notice something out of the ordinary, our fraud team will reach out to you for more information about the buyer and freeze the transaction before it turns into a payment dispute.
5. How often do you have to update your Payment Card Industry compliance? PCI compliance is a set of mandatory industry regulations that hold sellers accountable for keeping their customers’ credit card data safe from hackers.
1. D) Square takes care of this for me. It’s a big job to stay PCI compliant on your own, with expensive audits and assessments by the regulators and the potential for major fines if you’re found to be non-compliant. Square takes care of PCI compliance for all sellers by providing secure card readers that satisfy the PCI guidelines—free of charge.

If you have any questions about anything included on the quiz, post it on the Security Q&A thread for our security expert to answer in a couple weeks!

[pessosices]

Love it! Thanks so much for putting this together! Love the quiz format too!

[FashionFL]

Not sure I agree with the answer to #3. It has happened to me and it took far more than an hour to resolve.

In my case:

Boss gives secretary CC to pay me.

2 1/2 months later boss looks at bill and doesn’t recognize me and can’t recall what charge was for, so he files a dispute.

square takes the money out of my account, then informs me.

I call secretary, she reminds boss, lightbulb goes on, and he calls his CC company to say “oooops, my bad”

I inform square, they say they’ll take care of it, they don’t. I call again, they say give it a few days, nothing happens. Rinse and repeat several more times.

91 days later, the money shows up in my account.

[Kpay]

@FashionFL, thanks for the reply, and sorry you had to wait so long for the final resolution. I wanted to give you (and other readers) a little background on why you could end up waiting 90 days. 

A customer (in this case, your boss) disputes a payment with their bank and then the bank debits Square, who then debits the seller (in this case, you). In a typical case, where the customer and the seller aren’t in contact with each other, we would let the seller know what sort of documentation to send us so that we can put together the best possible challenge with the customer’s bank—this is the “less than an hour” amount we were referring to in the answer key. Using the Disputes Dashboard, the seller can send us their documentation and we’ll take it from there.

When we’ve helped the seller put together the best possible challenge to the dispute, we submit it to the bank and settle down to wait. Unfortunately, we don’t have any power to move the process with the bank along—the banks set the timeline, and as you experienced, it can take up to 90 days in some cases.

[HavenSpaAdmin]

I have a question about this very subject. I had a dispute last year for a gift card purchase of $500, which was redeemed in my store. Your information on how my business can protect myself is to verify the information of the purchaser in store - their name, their billing zip, the card, etc. But in the case of gift cards, they are purchased by one person and delivered to another. It's the other person that comes in and uses it, who may or may not have this identifying info. How do I protect my business from fraud in this case? 

[kellyj]

@HavenSpaAdmin

I just wanted to break this into a few parts so we can really dig into this.

I had a dispute last year for a gift card purchase of $500, which was redeemed in my store. 

To clarify, this reads as if the purchase of the card was disputed - the original $500, which was issued to the gift card. Making sure someone is providing proper identification, and protecting yourself by using the Chip Reader with the transaction - would be the proper information here, as you'll want to make sure you've done all within your power to legitimize the sale. 

Customer information is to protect you from fraudsters - not necessarily the chargeback itself. The Chargeback comes when we find out the fraudster DID successful use the card.  You can check out more information here in our Disputes Walkthrough.

If a chargeback is filed against a purchase of a gift card, you may want to void that gift card from future use, that way you are not allowing someone to check out for funds that were fraudulently put on that card.

You can Zero the balance on a gift card by looking at the Gift Card tab of your Dashboard > Overview > Click on the Gift Card that was issued to that transaction > Clear Balance

Since Square Gift Cards are uniquely purchased to your business, this can help you manage you gift cards.

If a Dispute is filed on a Gift Card issued by a major bank, the regular dispute process would through normal disputes channels would take place, and you'll want to defend yourself by providing as much detail and information as you have available.