Address Verification System

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The Address Verification System (AVS) is a system used to verify the identity of the person claiming to own the credit card. The system will check the billing address of the credit card provided by the user with the address on file at the credit card company. The other security features for the credit card include the CVV2 number and the expiration date.

AVS verifies the numeric portions of a cardholders billing address. For example, if your address is 101 Main Street, Highland, CA 92346, AVS will check 101 and 92346. Sometimes AVS checks additional digits such as as apartment number, other times it does not. As a result you may receive false negatives from e-commerce verification systems, which may require manual overrides.

[edit] AVS Support

At present, only a few countries support AVS on Visa and MasterCard, notably the USA, Canada and the United Kingdom. American Express does support AVS in more countries.

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