Will AVS or CV failure cause my transactions to deny?

When processing credit card transactions, the use of the Address Verification System (AVS) and validation of Security Code Values (CV) may or may not cause a transaction to decline. Here are some notes/rules of thumb our customers have experienced with these systems over the years.

  • In general a bad AVS response should not cause a transaction failure.
  • In practice, the street portion of an AVS check is un-reliable.
  • A bad CV code may very well cause a transaction failure. It is up to the Cards Issuer to determine if the transaction will fail or not based on bad CV. You could have one VISA card that fails and one VISA card that does not, but both have bad CV.

NOTE: You should ALWAYS check your CV and AVS response values!

As of Monetra 7 update 6.0, a new Fraud AutoDeny module has been introduced. This feature permits configuring Monetra to reject approved transactions presenting CV/CVV2/CID failures and/or AVS failures. A reversal will be automatically issued whenever a charge is rejected and, if that fails, a void will be performed instead. This feature can be configured globally and on a per-merchant basis.