Discard Zip Code Article For Free

Alone, your ZIP code might not be of much value all by itself, but criminals will take that information and post it on underground sites where they buy, sell and trade bunches of personal information. From those sites, criminals can purchase enough of your personal information to use it for fraud.

Stores want your ZIP code because, combined with your name from your credit card, they can use it to find out other information about you from commercial databases, like your full mailing address. They may even sell the information to data brokers, who sell it to other marketers.

Alone, your ZIP code might not be of much value all by itself, but criminals will take that information and post it on underground sites where they buy, sell and trade bunches of personal information. From those sites, criminals can purchase enough of your personal information to use it for fraud.

Your postal code or ZIP code acts as a security measure. When making purchases online with a credit card, you may be prompted to provide the mailing address or postal code associated with your card. This serves as a security check to ensure that you're the one using your card.

But the reason they require a billing address is to prevent fraud. In card-not-present transactions, which occur any time you're not physically at a store buying something, merchants typically use something called the Address Verification Service.

Beware ? the purpose may be to figure out your address so you can be put on a mailing list and bombarded with junk mail or nuisance calls. Or worse, your ZIP code may find its way to scammers who will couple it with other bits of personal data to steal your identity.

Conclusion. The zip code is the cardholder's identity. When you are asked to bypass the zip code during the purchase, you can simply skip it by inserting your home or office address zip code or the zip code where your card has been issued. However, you can use a different card because some cards don't require zip codes ...

ZIP Codes are numbered with the first digit representing a certain group of U.S. states, the second and third digits together representing a region in that group (or perhaps a large city) and the fourth and fifth digits representing a group of delivery addresses within that region.

A letter or parcel without a zip code is highly likely to never reach its intended destination. This is because of how the US Postal Service's automated systems process addresses.

In the early days of the U.S. Postal Service, mailing addresses weren't regulated. You might have used the recipient's street address along with the city and state, but you wouldn't have seen a ZIP code. Mail was hand-sorted, and delivery relied on local knowledge of its intended destination.