In my experience of setting up online credit card payment systems (dealing only in sums up to about US$1000 I admit) this isn't so. We were told by multiple card processing agencies (including some of the biggest in the world) that they have no way of validating addresses on cards unless they are in the US (perhaps it also included Canada - not sure on that). This is one of the reaons why there is so much online credit card fraud, but when addresses have so many possible formats and even scripts (Chinese or Japanese address validation anyone?) it is hard to see how it could ever be done for the whole world.