Abstract: A customer can obtain a refund for a credit card purchase by interacting with an agent of the merchant. The existing payment infrastructure is used, but without the direct participation of the merchant and without generating a chargeback against the merchant. A customer request for a refund is received and validated against multiple data streams including sales data and/or fraud screening databases. For a validated refund request, refund data is stored in a refund database and communicated over the payment processing network to create the refund from the merchant to the customer credit card.

Abstract: The invention provides a distributed information processing system for verifying the identities of telephone callers, in which data is stored in a first processing station and signal processing is performed by one or more speaker verification units located at one or more respective second, remote processing stations. The first processing station is arranged for storing data corresponding to a signature and to caller identification information for respective users. The second processing station or stations each include a speaker verification unit and a processor. The speaker verification unit is adapted for receiving, via the public telephone system, a voice and/or touch-tone signal representing a signature of a possible user, and for digitally signal processing the signal representing the signature.