Fraud prevention

I sell $500+ products, and it seems to be a strategy amoung scammers, wouldn't surprise me if there is a large ring. Our manufacturers have warned us about different billing/addresses, always be cautious. Shopify flags it if there's a chance of fraud and you should pay attention to that. If there is any question, phone the number on the order. Often fake orders will have no real number. I've phoned a couple times and orders were legit, but they appreciated the call. I've been lucky and haven't made any mistakes yet, but I dread it happening. It sucks because I think we're the ones that get screwed out of it.

The Shopify fraud prevention didn't give us any warning since everything looked legit. The phone provided was legit as well since we have to provide it to carrier because they have to call before delivering (big boxes). We're not taking any chance anymore, we just installed a fraud prevention service that covers us in case of charge backs.

What is the fraud prevention service you use? I use Subuno to help flag suspicious orders and then we try to creep them through social media and Google to verify ID. If it still looks shady then we hold the order and ask for ID and decline/void the order if no response.

Scammers overseas use mail fwd companies so watch out for address w routing numbers in them like #J467725 or long ass looking apt numbers. I compile as many of these to flag orders against if anyone orders to them.

This isn't 100% but it helped our charegeback rates go down.

I verify orders with AVS=U or AVS=N. I was rejecting these but my conversions dropped since many people use prepaid gift cards.

Get http://www.riskified.com/[1] now to protect yourself for the future or Sift Science. When I signed up they had a promotion of guaranteeing up to $50,000 in sales for free

I downloaded their app from Shopify and the fees are 0.7% per transactions if you decide to verify all transactions.

Ive been using riskified for a year and it's great. One fraudulent charge can cost more than a year of riskified. Also, i once claimed a chargeback with Shopify thining I would lose, and a month later I surprisingly won.

You can read my policy here: http://gpushack.com/pages/our-free-shipping-policy[2]

Edit: See my previous post about a fraud ring that targets "cardable" websites:https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/3gjack/my_ecommerce_site_was_listed_on_a_cardable_credit/

  

I just checked your shipping policy. It says Mis-matched shipping and billing addresses may cause an order delay. What happens during that delay? You contact the clients to make sure that the orders are legit?

If you can prove that you have shipped to the billing address, the CC will most always side with the merchant.

If you don't ship to billing address, you are taking a very big risk.

If the shipping and billing address are different and they have an international address or they are shipping to a freight forwarder (usually a commercial address with a weird suite number), I just cancel and refund the order and tell them to look at the shipping policy before ordering again.

If the shipping and billing addresses do not match and both look normal, I make sure that both addresses are at least within 30 miles of each other with google maps.

If the shipping address is a school or college, I am fairly confident that the order is legitimate.

If I still somewhat unsure, I ask them to provide two forms of ID. If they don't provide it in 48 hours, I cancel and refund their order.

My text:

Your order is currently on hold because it did not pass my payment processor's fraud protection checks.

For your order to be accepted, you must provide at least two forms of ID (both forms of ID visible in the same picture) in a reply to this email. You may provide a combination of the following: utility bill, card statement, government issued ID, or any official document that has both your name and your billing address in the same location.

You may only attempt to provide this information one time. If the information you provide is not sufficient, your order will be cancelled and refunded.

If you don't want to provide this information for privacy reasons, please let me know and I will cancel your order.

We set up with this service and haven't had issues since then:

• https://www.signifyd.com/

There are plugins you can run for many sites, I'm not sure if they are shopify compatible, but I know Wordpress has them.

Essentially they 'record' every visitor who comes to your site by video, so you have the entire checkout process 'on camera'.

A company I use to work for sold juice cleanses online, and would have a company driver deliver them. Many customers would receive their juice and then do a chargeback claiming the items were never delivered. Our credit processor explained that we were pretty much SOL, as are many online shops, with no card present during the transaction.

Using this checkout recording tool helped prevent thousands of dollars in chargebacks, considering the average order was $200 and we sold around 50/month

Hotjar design this.

In the future for large orders, always good to check that the shipping address is an authorized shipping address (you can check with the card issuing bank, i.e. which bank issued the credit card). Also, look the customer up on Spokeo ($10 a month) to verify they actually live there. Call them and ask them for the customer service # on the back of the credit card (the 1-800 #).

For large items, you may contact the local police since you can show it was delivered but without signature confirmation of delivery, little the police will do either.