Address Verification Service - AVS

You took his credit card when he was checking out of Best Buy with the eight flatscreens he'd purchased on said card. There was a nervous twitch and a shiftiness in his eyes. You went to authenticate the credit card and it asked for further verification. You asked for his address, and he had to look it up on "his" driver's license.

Clearly, something was amiss here. Well, credit card issuers use AVS to authenticate billing addresses of credit card users as an antifraud effort. The system is fussy. Sometimes, an exact match of commas, spaces, and abbreviations has to be had. God help you if you typed "rd" instead of "road." But AVS exists for good reason: fraudsters live now seemingly on every corner.