Home Page   About Us     Reference   Guarantee  Shipping  Contact us

What is SouthwestAffinity.com doing to protect me from having my credit card information stolen and making sure that their servers are secure?

Thank you for visiting our web site and online catalog.  We are continually working to protect our customers and providing a safe and secure environment for you to shop in.  We are in compliance with the rules and regulations as set out by Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express otherwise known as PCI (Payment Card Industry).  Our shopping shop servers are Verisign protected and verified hacker safe and we are certified PCI compliant in our office practices as well.  We are always striving to provide the very best in Internet Security to protect our customers during any transactions with southwestaffinity.com. 

Our shopping shop is powered by coolcart, a leader in merchant services for the small to middle sized ecommerce sites.  coolcart is owned by Bruce Babbin and you can check them out at www.coolcart.net.  coolcart and their servers are secure and certified by Hacker Safe and you can verify that they too are in compliance by visiting their web site at http://coolcart.net.  There certification is towards the bottom of the page.  If you have any questions regarding our compliance, please feel free to contact me.

Sincerely,

Eugene Gruber

What is PCI compliance?

Who is Scan Alert or Hacker Safe?

What is the CSC code?

What is PCI compliance?

PCI stands for the new Payment Card Industry (PCI) otherwise known as your credit card company such as Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, etc.  The credit card industry has set up rules for protecting your credit card information to provide maximum protection against credit card theft and any possibilities of having your credit card information stolen from any merchant that accepts credit cards.  This is called data security.  Data security standards are rules that we must follow in the following areas: 

Network security - Securing servers and network(s) of computers in our offices, the server our web site is on, as well as our shopping shop server.

Business practice guidelines - Office policy that prevents credit card information from being stolen from our place of business, such as written records of credit card information on invoices or in databases on our computers.

These guidelines and rules were developed by the credit card industry, such as Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover Card. They were developed to establish a 'minimum security standard' with regards to the protection of cardholders' account and transaction information. 

To be in compliance in these two areas here is what we are doing to protect you:

Network Security:  We must pass a very through scan of our office computers and network that checks for any vulnerabilities that might allow someone to be able to hack our systems.  This scan is done daily to insure that our servers and computers are not vulnerable to any hackers and are SECURE for your protection.  A check of our office computers is also done on a random and regular basis to make sure we are not vulnerable to hackers obtaining access to our office network.

Business Practices:  We maintain a secure network of computers that are protected from anyone hacking our office systems which is checked by a specialist in Internet security.  We are behind a router, as well as run virus scan software and a firewall to keep intruders out.  In addition, the only records we maintain are those of invoices, which do not have any credit card information at all recorded anywhere on our computers.  When you place an order the credit card information goes through a secure server that processes an authorization of payment and transaction number.  Your credit card information does not pass to us at anytime.  We have the ability to capture the authorized payment by using your transaction number, but are not given access to your credit card information.

When orders are called in or mailed in with credit card information, the owner, Beverley Jones, is the only one that has access to this information.  After the credit card is billed, all credit card information is destroyed so that there are no credit card numbers stored in our offices, on our computers, or anywhere else involving Southwest Affinity.

Southwest Affinity.com is in compliance with Internet Network Security and Business Practice recommendations as set forth by the PCI and are PCI compliant.  Our shopping shop passes a very thorough check of our systems and servers by Scan Alert on a regular basis to protect our customers from having their credit card information compromised!  For more information on PCI data security standards visit this site:  http://www.mastercard.com/us/sdp/index.html

Who is Scan Alert or Hacker Safe? 

ScanAlert is the world's largest ecommerce security auditing company, protecting and certifying more than 70,000 web sites in 40 countries through its HACKER SAFE certification trustmark program. ScanAlert is accredited by MasterCard and VISA to provide PCI compliance services. More information is available at http://www.ScanAlert.com.  As a Visa and MasterCard "Qualified Independent Scan Vendor," all credit card companies and banks worldwide accept ScanAlert's Certification of PCI Compliance.

What is the CSC?

Many are confused by the CSC number that is required to process your credit card.  CSC stands for "Card Security Code."  This is something that online credit card processors, such as Nova and Verisign, require in order to approve your credit card transaction.  This is to add even more security to your online transaction because you must be in possession of your credit card to obtain this information.  Here is where you can find it:

When you are processing your payment, you can click on the blue CSC next to the box and it will bring this picture up in a separate window to help remind you where to find this number.  The CSC code is not stored anywhere and we destroy it along with the credit card information after it is processed.  This information does not pass to us from our online credit card processors either.

Southwest Affinity