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Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”
- ProofHouse 4mo agoI was so annoyed with their onboarding for new accts I moved to Square on every project. Love it! Never going back
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- dentemple 4mo agoThen what are the better alternatives?
- bombcar 4mo agoNothing, it’s a 5% bobcat problem. The card processors can force the merchants to eat it and there’s nothing you can do save not accepting cards, which loses you the other 95% of the market. https://xkcd.com/325/ https://xkcd.com/325/
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Cider9986 4mo agoMonero or honestly any crypto. There's no chargebacks and it can be more private.
- N_Lens 4mo agoDon't most crypto exchanges ban Monero?
- Cider9986 4mo agoYes, unfortunately the banking system is hostile to privacy even though the vast majority of money laundering goes through fiat.
- wildzzz 4mo agoThat's fine for some things but my grandma is not going to buy from an online store that only takes crypto. Crypto as a payment option works well for computer-related merchants or for privacy-focused merchants. Like it wouldn't be uncommon to rent a VPS with crypto but it would be strange for an online candy store to accept it.
- Cider9986 4mo ago> That's fine for some things but my grandma is not going to buy from an online store that only takes crypto. Of course not, unless it becomes mainstream, crypto usage will always be by early adopters and technologists. I don't care if you accept cards as well, I just want to be able to pay privately with Monero. You're right that for chargebacks specifically the only way to eliminate them would be 100% crypto, not the option of card and crypto together, which is significantly more likely. But there are other benefits for customers(privacy), which is why I use it.
- wildzzz 4mo agoACH payments are another way to eliminate chargebacks. Generally you need to say the payment was unauthorized rather than trying to use it as a forced refund and you may even be charged a fee.
- vintermann 4mo agoIn fact it can be so private you'll never know who the merchant who didn't send you the product is.
- lxgr 4mo ago"No chargebacks" means you'll have a very hard time attracting new customers, though, as bootstrapping trust is much harder that way.
- sbierwagen 4mo agoStripe obviously records data around friendly fraud, (At minimum they implement Visa Compelling Evidence 3.0 https://support.stripe.com/questions/how-does-stripe-support-visa-compelling-evidence-3-0 https://support.stripe.com/questions/how-does-stripe-support... ) and since you did not include screenshots of the messages sent by Stripe support I suspect they were saying something carefully noncommittal and legally compliant to get you to go away, which then got spun into an outraged blog post.
- bfkwlfkjf 4mo agoWhat's your point? Do you think it matters what stripe said? What is something that they could've said that wouldn't have justified the outraged blog post?
- SpicyLemonZest 4mo agoThe author thinks it matters what Stripe said, since they chose to use it as the title for their blog post. To the extent that it was just meant to be a lament that it's hard to be a small online merchant in an era of strong consumer protections, sure, I sympathize. But they seem to think it's a problem with Stripe that could be fixed if Stripe behaved better.
- gingerlime 4mo agoAuthor here. What makes you think Stripe cannot do better here?
- akerl_ 4mo agoStripe has a customer's bank saying "the customer says they didn't make this payment" and you saying "the customer told me they did make this purchase and got the item and they're making fun of me". They have no way to know if your evidence is real, any more than the bank has a way to know if their customer's evidence is real. Either one (or both) of you could be full of shit. In that world, what would you like Stripe to do better?
- ValentineC 4mo agoThere aren't any screenshots of conversations with Stripe support in the blog post, but I'm guessing one other reason is that support agents are incentivised to close tickets or end conversations as quickly as possible.
- shash7 4mo agoI run a saas and we get this every now and then. As a rule of thumb, when you get a chargeback you need to completely ban the customer from your db. This includes: - card ban - email address ban - fingerprint their access and ban This will save you a lot of hassle when they try to signup/buy your product again and cause you the same amount of grief.
- epa 4mo agoExploiters easily get around this. its a small group of people doing all of the abuse.
- wahnfrieden 4mo agoUse DeviceCheck if iOS app too. Uber does this to ban across accounts
- Cider9986 4mo agoI imagine most fraudsters wouldn't be using iOS. I'm curious if the android app fingerprinting solutions go cross user profile.
- ACCount37 4mo agoAs far as I know, DRM systems like Widewine have IDs that cross user profile lines.
- lxgr 4mo agoGreat, another thing to worry about when buying a used phone: Did any of the previous owners get banned by any of the apps I intend to use on it?
- joshstrange 4mo agoThat's an interesting idea. The sad thing is, the money lost through chargebacks is minimal for me in the grand scheme of things but it makes me irate enough to potentially spend the development time (that will never have a positive ROI) on adding in something like this just to stick it to the scammers.
- ios-contractor 4mo agoTo be fair, from stripe's point of view, how would they know that you and the alleged customer are not in on it for some reason they don't know?
- jellomjello 4mo ago? in on what?
- AnthonyMouse 4mo ago"Friendly fraud" is when the cardholder is in on it. They or an accomplice they've given access to their credit card go to a merchant, order and receive an expensive item with the card and then file a chargeback claiming they didn't make the purchase so they can keep both the item and the money.
- wildzzz 4mo agoWhat would be there to gain? The merchant loses money to the credit card processing fees, chargeback fees, and shipping cost along with the loss of the product, they gain nothing. Its a pretty expensive way to send a customer a free thing.
- NDlurker 4mo agoSo I can crack open a Backwoods, stick my weed in there, and then glue back together with Ciglue? That's pretty cool.
- gingerlime 4mo agoThank you. Haha, yes. My product is focused on cigar repair, but I know some weed smokers that use cigar glue (mine or other brands) for blunts.
- iririririr 4mo agoi went the other way, and already repaired more than one dropped cig with a good sheet of pure cellulose wrapping paper. I cannot imagine someone buying a glue for that. but I'm not german.
- gingerlime 4mo agoIt’s sold in 20+ countries around the world, not just Germany. If you’re talking about premium cigars, using paper is possible but kinda ugly. The glue is similar to what rollers use when rolling cigars in the factory. It works well and fits well with the cigar smoking experience. You don’t have to buy (my) glue. You can make your own and I even share recipes on the website. Ciglue however offers convenience with the dispenser and integrated brush and glue. (wasn’t expecting to get into details about my product on HN but love how diverse the community is)
- bberenberg 4mo agoI got hit with a fraudulent chargeback (claim was the purchase was unauthorized and the person showed up in person to a class) and it was doubly bad because they paid via Link which means that Stripe actively verified them via 2FA. Can someone explain to me why Stripe (or a competitor) doesn't offer a setting "refuse transactions for cards that have filed > x chargebacks with <acquirer> merchants this year"?
- cperciva 4mo agoclaim was the purchase was unauthorized and the person showed up in person to a class Certainly a person showed up in person to a class, but how do you know it was the person whose credit card was used?
- bberenberg 4mo agoIt matched their LinkedIn photo.
- jagged-chisel 4mo ago[flagged]
- mattmaroon 4mo agoDo you imagine someone got a stolen credit card, made a linkedin with that name, used the card to attend a live class under the fake ID, or are you just doing the classic hacker news aaaaactually? Comments like this have ruined this site. We all know that’s never happened once in history.
- lunchbucket 4mo agoIf you care about the quality of the site, consider the guidelines about not responding to a bad comment with a worse one and not griping about how HN has gotten terrible or turned into reddit or what there you. Downvote, flag, and move on to better discussion, and you'll spend a lot more time engaging and contributing to good discussions. Contributing to good discussions is the highest leverage way to promote the quality of the site. Spending time in poor discussions is what makes it feel like HN has gone to crap.
- varenc 4mo ago> They told me they don’t use evidence of chargeback abuse from one merchant to create cross-merchant fraud signals, or to take action against the customer’s card, email, or other details for other merchants. I'm surprised they were able to get Stripe to actually state all of this clearly. It's nice that Stripe actually communicates details like this. But you can see the logic behind why many other big companies would just respond with an opaque message like "thank you for your report, it will be handled in the appropriate manner". Because saying the truth gets people more upset.
- nathanmills 4mo agoNo, vagueness gets me much more upset, but there's just nothing to write about in those cases.
- mamurphy 4mo ago>No, vagueness gets me much more upset, but there's just nothing to write about in those cases. I think this hits on the spirit behind GP's point. Clarity, leading to an article like the one posted, gets more people upset. The equation (Upset/People x People) results in a larger number -- people, as a whole, are more upset. >But you can see the logic behind why many other big companies would just respond with an opaque message like "thank you for your report, it will be handled in the appropriate manner". Because saying the truth gets people more upset. If a company is vague, there's nothing to write about, one person (maybe) gets more upset than they would have facing clarity. But if the company is clear, there is something to write about, and an article like the one posted makes people, overall, more upset.
- nathanmills 4mo agoI don't see many people upset at Stripe over this, I certainly am not.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 4mo agoNo. This is what you’re saying because you want to plead your case to find out as much as you can. Saying less works. Everyone knows this, because it’s true. You just don’t like it.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- hdndjsbbs 4mo agoI had a customer do something similar with a thousand-dollar product. They had signed for delivery and provided no evidence, but banks always side with the customer.
- zuzululu 4mo agoMy suggestion is to just ban specific regions or countries and you can cut 80% of this fraud. I'm not going to name those countries outright but you should never ever be launching globally until you have these safeguards in place. Once you are known to be vulnerable to a certain scheme, it quickly becomes known in that region/country. Again and again I'm reminded why high trust societies remain high trust and why low trust societies rarely transform into high trust society.
- Cider9986 4mo agoAccept crypto for those countries, it doesn't have chargebacks and helps those vulnerable to the financial system.
- shimman 4mo agoMan people are still using the "it's a currency" grift when discussing crypto, did the El Salvador failure really teach you nothing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_in_El_Salvador https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_in_El_Salvador
- koolba 4mo agoCrypto does have the distinct cash like advantage of not having chargebacks. I don’t know of any other digital payment system with that property.
- sieabahlpark 4mo ago[dead]
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 4mo agoThat's less because it was Bitcoin and more because the entire effort was a slapdash affair pushed by Bukele in an effort for him and his buddies to profit off the cryptocurrency boom rather than being an inherent knock on cryptocurrency itself. Also of all the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin is a pretty poor choice since it could be pretty well argued that it has lost the original purpose and devolved into a raw "line go up" financial instrument.
- tptacek 4mo agoIsn't this a property (and longstanding value judgement) of the entire payment card ecosystem?
- AnthonyMouse 4mo agoWhen a problem is industry-wide, people are naturally going to complain about the most prominent companies, but that's not necessarily even wrong. The most prominent companies are the ones in the strongest position to actually do something about it (e.g. develop better detection for friendly fraud or lobby for sensible regulatory changes), and have a stronger incentive to when they're the ones who keep getting blamed.
- tonyarkles 4mo agohttps://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra... Classic patio11 article.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- stego-tech 4mo agoAt this point I’m fairly convinced Stripe is Paypal 2.0, at least in spirit: * Turns a blind eye to misdeeds on its platform * Locks out adult creators/vendors after taking their money * Is ubiquitous, but not well liked I love that Stripe changed the game of fintech and made it accessible to more parties in a programmatic way, but I find myself repeating “avoid Stripe” to a lot of folks asking me for advice on dealing with payment nowadays for those reasons.
- mattmaroon 4mo agoWho do you recommend as an alternative?
- stego-tech 4mo agoI don’t have one at the moment, at least for my circles (artisans, craftspeople, adult creators in general). Much of it has fallen back on PayPal for folks without an LLC to hide behind, or Square if they’re incorporated as a business. The trick has been discretion and operating in a gray area: “novelty goods”, “graphic design work”, and “outerwear” as item descriptors or db entries, obscuring the actual content without actually lying or deceiving the payment processor. Most paypros, most of the time, won’t look too hard unless there’s a problem or you’re tripping some internal security measure (like raking in a lot of cash in weird amounts). Of late they’ve been more intrusive due to some weird eTeen puritans, but that’s quieting down again as they remember they like making money, and throwing legal content off their platforms can very quickly cause an exodus of customers looking to avoid having their funds seized.
- rsanek 4mo agoThat's pretty clearly deceiving. Would expect to run into problems with that kind of approach regardless of the specific payment processor -- everyone has T&C that you must follow.
- stego-tech 4mo agoProblems occur either way due to a lack of regulations on these entities allowing them to dictate acceptable financial transactions regardless of actual legality. Consider the risk matrix: * You sell legal goods or services and are entirely honest about them to the paypro; if the T&Cs change down the line, your honesty makes you a prime target for having your funds seized and ability to process transactions terminated first, posing an existential threat to your business with no reward for your honesty * You sell legal goods and services, but don’t volunteer extraneous details about them since that’s not the business of a paypro. Should the T&Cs change, your obscurity buys you time to adapt or seek alternatives before inevitably being caught up in the paypro’s internal surveillance measures. * You sell legal goods and services, but assume your paypro is hostile from the get go regardless of the T&Cs and hand over the minimal information necessary to process a transaction. You have maximum time to find alternatives should the T&Cs change, because your baseline operations make it that much harder to identify your transactions down the line. Honesty is inevitably punished while obscurity is rewarded, at least for a time. It’s also worth pointing out the hypocrisy of needling paypro users to follow arbitrary and changing rules of the paypro but allowing said paypros to reject legal transactions for whatever reason they wish or selectively comply with laws because they’re “fintech” and not banks or payment card networks: why should users face more onerous restrictions than the paypro themselves? Ultimately the solution is the same one we’ve been parroting for years ever since PayPal arbitrarily changed their T&Cs to try booting adult creators off its platform: government regulations barring these entities outright from refusing any legal transaction. It’s part of the playbook at this point for tech companies in light of its success: court adult content creators and communities to grow the platform, then shut them out once there’s money to be made.
- bix6 4mo agoSignifyd (company) solves this issue.
- chasebank 4mo agohow so?
- bix6 4mo agohttps://www.signifyd.com/fearless-conversions/ https://www.signifyd.com/fearless-conversions/ They have a comprehensive customer ID system and let you adjust desired risk levels for various forms of fraud. Epic username btw lol
- plumeria 4mo agoHow does it compare to Google Cloud Fraud Defense (previously ReCAPTCHA Enterprise)?
- nostromo 4mo agoThe customer screwed you over, and then their bank did too. Stripe didn't. I'm not sure why Stripe is getting blamed in the title and the article. Yeah, maybe Stripe could do more without Radar, but I imagine it could also be fraught if Stripe was in the business of blocking customers from their entire network based on one vendor's complaint. Obviously a lot could go wrong with such an approach.
- gingerlime 4mo agoYes. But Stripe didn't do anything to prevent the next merchant from falling into the same trap. They had all the evidence, and ignored it. That was the point I tried to make with my blog post. And yes, if it was too easy for merchants to block consumers, that won't be fair either. But surely there's a middle ground here. Stripe very explicitly told me that they don't do anything with such reports. It's simply ignored.
- zuzululu 4mo agoStripe did the right thing here. They cannot be arbitrators of every little edge cases that comes up. That's not their role. Also I just wanna throw some praise at Stripe Support. They have an excellent team and go above and beyond to help.
- gingerlime 4mo agoAgree on Stripe support. They're excellent. I don't think Stripe did the right thing here. They can do better to protect their own customers.
- 0123456789ABCDE 4mo agostripe serves both sides of the transactions they process, seller and buyer. if buyers were to perceive stripe as being dificult, they might churn. i certainly do this on paypal pages.
- 4mo ago
- Suppafly 4mo agoYou know enough about the buyer to sue them or report them to the FBI.
- tonyarkles 4mo agoSuing someone in the Philippines probably won’t be worth the effort for an $18 product. And the FBI probably will not care much about a $18 international fraud.
- gingerlime 4mo agoYeah. This case Canada. Not sure where to report but seems unlikely to do anything. Will happily report out of principle so any tips welcome.
- pseudo0 4mo agoYou presumably have their shipping address, so you can look up their local police department and report it as general fraud. Eg. The Toronto police have an online reporting tool for fraud and scams: https://www.tps.ca/services/online-reporting/ https://www.tps.ca/services/online-reporting/ If it happens to be a slow day, or the person is already on their shit list (eg. on probation) maybe something will come of it. Having the gloating emails definitely helps. Or maybe the report just goes into a file until this person does this for a more expensive item and then it gets pulled to prove a pattern of behavior.
- RevEng 4mo agoA lawsuit will cost you at least thousands of dollars if you can even serve the person. The FBI doesn't care about even thousands of dollars of fraud; they are busy chasing million dollar crime rings. Try reporting to your local police and see what they say - they will advise you it is not even worth your time to write out a report because it won't be investigated. Heck, my mom was defrauded out of $10k by a persistent group of people running a fake crypto investing company, and when she reported to the government body specifically responsible for investigating those cases, the nice man said, "Thanks for letting us know." They don't have time to investigate and prosecute minor fraud.
- danpalmer 4mo agoThis is just fraud. "Friendly fraud" is accidental or with the correct intentions – such as the customer not recognising the charge and charging back.
- gingerlime 4mo agoYes, and Stripe could do much better to prevent it. And doesn't.
- akerl_ 4mo agoWhat would you like them to do? Even in the post you're wishy washy about what you want. They offer a product that does enhanced fraud detection but you don't like that. You correctly call out that there's major risks with taking a merchant's report and using it to flag a user's future transactions.
- fweimer 4mo agoThe article mentions Stripe's product in this space: https://stripe.com/en-us/radar https://stripe.com/en-us/radar There are similar offerings from other companies. I don't know if bundling this with payment processing is common.
- danpalmer 4mo agoThey could, but this isn't discussed in the blog post. The post is about literal fraud, which has a very different recourse for the merchant.
- bradley13 4mo agoThis is the point. You could file criminal charges. You could win in civil court.
- lxgr 4mo agoGenuinely not recognizing a charge is not fraud, as that to me requires intent (or at least gross negligence, e.g., something like "I'll just dispute everything I don't remember, and not make a particularly good effort to remember anything at all"). "Just fraud" is already taken for "criminal c uses unwitting cardholder a's card at unwitting merchant b", so what's your objection against "fiendly fraud"?
- phonon 4mo agoUse EMV 3DS 2.x authentication with liability shift protection?
- mchusma 4mo agoI am pretty convinced that friendly fraud is about 90% of chargebacks. I have seen some genuine fraud, but dwarfed by friendly fraud over time across 3 companies.
- reactordev 4mo agoA friend of mine has a "1 dispute and your banned rule"... sounds like it could help in this situation. He'll catch wind of someone disputing they didn't receive a product he makes, despite his OCD with packaging, and gets a chargeback. He sits down each week with all the chargebacks he's gotten and bans them from future sales. It's not often but when he does, he complains about it when I see him.
- Ayush_Khati1 4mo ago[flagged]
- GuardCalf 4mo agoSolid post. The key takeaway for me was Stripe admitting they won't use post-dispute evidence of friendly fraud to build cross-merchant signals in Radar. That, plus the customer literally bragging about it after winning the chargeback, shows how lopsided the system is against indie sellers. Thanks for sharing.
- charcircuit 4mo ago>And the bank, naturally, sided with them. How is it natural if DHL had proof of delivery.
- vintermann 4mo agoI guess DHL had proof of delivery of a box.
- gingerlime 4mo agoYeah I didn’t really go into it, but I can imagine a bank prefers to take care of their own customer than about a small merchant. I’m definitely frustrated with the whole system. But I expected at least Stripe to try to protect its own customers (merchants).
- fencepost 4mo agoI assume that this is basically just not worth pursuing for small-scale orders (e.g. $15ish for Ciglue), but for larger ones what are the reasonable approaches for scenarios that don't involve stolen card fraud? Notably disputing a credit card charge is completely independent of whether someone owes the debt, the credit card is simply a convenient way for that payment to be handled. What's the point where other collection methods make sense? As an example, if you're consulting for someone and they pay you $x,xxx via card then charge it back, at least in most of the US I believe it's legal for you to do your own collection efforts and contact them repeatedly (this changes if you sell the debt and it's a third party attempting collections).
- dghlsakjg 4mo agoCorrect, the debt is still valid. You can try to collect through persistence, or take them to court, get a judgment, and then a court ordered collection. It all depends on the value of your time. I’ve heard rumors that some merchant agreements with processors may include arbitration clauses for recovering chargebacks, but I’ve never seen it personally.
- burnJS 4mo agoI lose disputes all the time, no matter the evidence. I'm not happy with Stripe. The only thing keeping me from looking at alternatives is the low volume of fraud committed against my SaaS. Do better Stripe. Be better Stripe. Or eventually we will find someone better. Think. Don't enshittify. Your support has already become covered in it by doing the needful.
- ripberge 4mo agoI dealt with millions of dollars in chargebacks with Stripe. We sold tickets, they're easy to re-sell and our customers were tourists visiting shows from all over the world. Stripe Radar was not a good product. It would score large numbers of very suspect transactions at a risk level of 1 or 2 (out of 100). I don't have an ML background, but something about their methodology was just flawed. It behaved as if there was a wire loose in it. Unfortunately, I don't think they're very incentivized to care.
- startages 4mo agoI help a lot of client with their ecommerce websites (mostly WooCommerce), attacks became so common recently, could be AI, but I found the best way to deal with this is to trace the patterns in access log and block the same patterns of checkout submission, this have worked really well for me. There are a lot of card testing attacks that Stripe doesn't care to handle as well as a lot of other fraud techniques, but there is always a pattern, especially automated ones. There is country, IP range, certain behavior (eg; no js, or direct api calls..etc). I really think it's easy to deal with this if you're willing to look deeper than a dashboard.
- gingerlime 4mo agonone of the technical measures you mentioned could work with “friendly fraud”. It was a real human with a real card with a real address with details all matching, then disputing a payment they themselves made for a product they received.
- xyst 4mo agoIf they are using the same name, address. Why not just flag the "friendly fraud" before fulfilling it?
- ro_sharp 4mo agoAll of these may result in you bringing in less $ overall, so it really depends on how much each fraud case costs you, but you could (off the top of my head): - Enable always checking CVV - Require 3DS - Ban a card after N disputes - Ban an email/other identifier after N disputes - Ban certain payment methods, banks etc - Add a visible or invisible captcha to fight automated abuse/card testing I suspect Stripe walks a fine line where they want to help you prevent fraud, but they also want to avoid vendors complaining to them that their customers can’t pay. Context: I worked on a payments team for a short while.
- gingerlime 4mo agoNone of the technical measures you mentioned are relevant with “friendly fraud”. And that’s exactly the problem that Stripe doesn’t solve. And doesn’t want to help merchants fight against.
- mrguyorama 4mo agoCertain 3DS setups would shift fraud liability to the payment network itself. That is the only payment network solution to an entity that will happily sign off on clearly false chargebacks. Then they would themselves be fighting the institution agreeing to sign off on bad chargebacks.
- gingerlime 4mo agoEven when the consumer claims that they didn’t receive the product?
- mrguyorama 4mo agoActually no, I am wrong, and duh, of course they don't take liability for "Not delivered". The protection against that is the legal system unfortunately.
- csomar 4mo agotl;dr: stripe doesn't provide protection until you buy Radar (a separate product which should have been part of the stripe offering but uh...). So the incentive is to let stripe customers burn in charge backs so that they buy radar.
- l5870uoo9y 4mo agoI wonder how much revenue Stripe would loose if it cracked down on chargeback fraud and free trial abuse (cards defaulting) and similar? Even just a few percentage out of an annual revenue of $5.1 billion is substantial.
- account42 4mo agoHave you considered filing a police report? I'm not sure if small claims would be an option if you are a commercial seller. Anything that actually discourages that behavior directly is better than some slightly more negative reputation in an opaque fraud detection system.
- trimethylpurine 4mo agoIf they committed fraud and you have evidence of the criminal activity, and their address, you could file a police report or a small claims case to inconvenience them back. The only thing protecting the criminal is that you don't care to press the issue any more than Stripe does.
- majora2007 4mo agoOne thing that is so painful with Stripe is the Disputes because no matter how much evidence I show, even emails with the user claiming they did it because of X, Y, Z. ToS not upheld, etc, the customer always wins. For me, I do a cheap subscription (4$/mon, first month 2$) and one dispute costs me like 20-30$. So that one person wipes a ton of profit from me. I always try to refund them (but you can't refund a customer with a dispute in effect). Stripe is great to get going, but has a lot of painful points.
- pas 4mo agoDoes Stripe have any published stats on the ratios? Did any merchant ever won such a Stripe dispute?
- gingerlime 4mo agoI’d be curious too. Previous experience at a SaaS was that we never won disputes and it was too time consuming on top, so we just ate the dispute fees and refund. I always thought things are easier with a physical product where you have a 3rd party like DHL that proves delivery was made. But at least in my tiny sample space, that’s not enough to win the dispute.
- kweks 4mo agoStripe is a payment gateway, not an anti-fraud solution. I'd recommend using services such as wyllo or Signifyd for anti-fraud. They will pre-filter against network intelligence signals, and if they approve the transaction, will guarantee your funds, even if a chargeback is lost, and even if you lose.
- plumeria 4mo agoIs the usage-based pricing of Signifyd et al cheaper than using 3D secure? What about "micro" transactions?
- kondo 4mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- jhmeltzer 4mo agoHey, I'm Jacob. I lead Radar engineering at Stripe (our fraud product). First, I’m sorry. We know this kind of fraud abuse is maddening. This is not the experience we want our users to have. The point many people have made here is fair. That this is not just about whether Stripe can reverse a specific dispute after the fact; it’s about whether clear evidence of chargeback abuse can help protect the next business. We can do more there. There is a real balance to strike overall that we are working towards. We do not want a world where a report from one business automatically blocks a buyer across all businesses on Stripe. Legitimate disputes happen, consumer accounts get compromised, and false positives from over-blocking can hurt real buyers. But there is a gap between “automatically ban this person everywhere” and “thanks for the screenshots” and we want to build solutions here. We've seen friendly fraud grow significantly, and it's pushed us to evolve Radar from transaction fraud protection into a broader product that protects a business from fraud and abuse across various points in the customer lifecycle, like account signup, trial start, etc. There's a ton more we can do but here's a few things we're working on to help: - Tracking serial chargeback abusers. We're working on identifying serial abusers of the dispute process across Stripe's network, and surfacing that to businesses before the transaction happens, as well as leverage it in our decisioning. - Scoring the risk holistically. While we'll keep building fraud and abuse solutions that help at individual points of the customer lifecycle (trial, payment, refund, etc), we're starting to score customer accounts themselves for aggregate abuse risk, leveraging Stripe network data. We're actively working on product-izing this now. - Helping you win disputes when friendly fraud happens. Friendly fraud can be really hard to capture. We want to prevent as much as possible, but we also want to make it as easy as possible to fight back against friendly fraud when it does happen. Our Smart Disputes product already incorporates friendly fraud insights into the evidence we compile, and we’re seeing early success. We're building more defenses as well as working to enrich merchant-submitted evidence. Many of our best ideas come directly from our users. If anyone wants to share feedback on Radar, feel free to email me at jacobmeltzer at stripe dot com.
- gingerlime 4mo agoThanks for chiming in. I appreciate it. That said, I don't think you're really addressing the main point on my post. There is clear evidence here of intentional fraud, yet Stripe does nothing with it. And from what I gathered previously with my own experience, and supported by comments on this discussion, Stripe win rate for disputing chargebacks is virtually nil. I'd love to be proven wrong here if you can share your actual win/lose rate stats.
- deleted 4mo ago