Even strict compliance with government and industry regulations cannot protect card issuers from the steadily evolving tricks of fraudsters. Such criminals constantly are finding new ways to take advantage of cracks in issuers’ data walls.

Last year, such slightly inaccurate data was causing major headaches for Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Total Card, Inc., which offers a credit card by that name in conjunction with a bank.

“People with dubious credit histories have become very clever about seeking credit by altering the spellings of their names, adding initials and making slight changes in street names so it creates a new address that is delivered to the old address,” says Mike Wheeler, total Card’s chief software architect.

To solve its problems with falsified data, Total Card contracted with Melissa Data of Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif., which provided Total Card with real-time verification of applicants’ addresses. The system it uses, Data Quality Web Service, is based on the Postal Service’s file of some 142 million deliverable addresses across the nation.

Since implementing the system in the fall of 2004, Total Card has dramatically cut down on bad data with its online applications, says Wheeler.

“When the system flags something as suspicious, we put one of our investigators on it immediately,” he says.