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Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”

gingerlime.com

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Re: Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”

#91

Post by gingerlime »

bberenberg wrote: post #14

I 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 merchants this year"?

Yeah, though this rule sounds a bit tricky. Like what if someone legitimately had their card abused.

The thing that gets me is that Stripe boasts about their machine learning radar rules etc etc, but somehow can't feed it actually valuable data.

Stripe support saw the emails from the customer boasting about defrauding me, they completely agreed that this is a clear case of friendly-fraud, but did nothing with this info.

Re: Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”

#92

Post by zuzululu »

gingerlime wrote: post #79
nostromo wrote: post #42

The 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.

Yes. 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 ignore…

Stripe 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.

Re: Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”

#93

Post by vbezhenar »

shash7 wrote: post #63
zuzululu wrote: post #28

My 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…

I've got 13 chargebacks over the last 4 years for my biz. Out of these, 10 came from US based cards. The other 3 came from Australia(my country). Be careful when taking verbatim advice from internet strangers.

I live in Kazakhstan (I assume that's one country nobody heard of and would disable in their dashboard) and my bank doesn't even have any UI for chargebacks, nor I ever heard about anyone doing chargebacks. They even explicitly warn me sometimes that I assume all responsibility for that payment. I guess I can go through some process, it's VISA after all, but it's definitely not something I can do easily.

Re: Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”

#94

Post by gingerlime »

tonyarkles wrote: post #54
Suppafly wrote: post #50

You know enough about the buyer to sue them or report them to the FBI.

Suing 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.

Yeah. This case Canada. Not sure where to report but seems unlikely to do anything. Will happily report out of principle so any tips welcome.

Re: Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”

#95

Post by mamurphy »

nathanmills wrote: post #45
varenc wrote: post #16

> 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 woul…

No, vagueness gets me much more upset, but there's just nothing to write about in those cases.

>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.

Re: Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”

#96

Post by Cider9986 »

shimman wrote: post #51
Cider9986 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accept crypto for those countries, it doesn't have chargebacks and helps those vulnerable to the financial system.

Man 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

That's the whole thing with Monero. It's actually used as a currency, not as a get rich quick scam. I believe 99% of crypto is a scam, but Monero is a real improvement for payments. The Monero community actually wants it to be adopted to spend it, it's not a price go up community.

Buy food with Monero on an ebay type platform called xmrbazaar.

(https://xmrbazaar.com/search-category/food/)

Donate to non-profits in Monero

(https://donatemonero.org)

GrapheneOS says it's the only crypto that they regularly get recurring small donations in.

Re: Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”

#97

Post by akerl_ »

gingerlime wrote: post #80
danpalmer wrote: post #59

This is just fraud. "Friendly fraud" is accidental or with the correct intentions – such as the customer not recognising the charge and charging back.

Yes, and Stripe could do much better to prevent it. And doesn't.

What 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.

Re: Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”

#98

Post by Cider9986 »

denkmoon wrote: post #68
Cider9986 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accept crypto for those countries, it doesn't have chargebacks and helps those vulnerable to the financial system.

Have you ever actually used crypto to buy something? The transaction fees are exorbitant and prohibitive, and it's slow as balls.

Yes, all the time. I usually pay a 1 cent fee and the transaction goes through in seconds. Not sure what you're talking about.

I can send you some if you want to try it out, just drop an address(for a wallet I recommend cakewallet, but any popular open source wallet works).

I'm talking about Monero specifically, but your reply makes no sense because there are cryptos that have 0 transaction fee and instant confirmaiton. But they are less secure and private so I don't use them, I only use Monero.

Re: Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”

#99

Post by DaSHacka »

denkmoon wrote: post #68
Cider9986 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accept crypto for those countries, it doesn't have chargebacks and helps those vulnerable to the financial system.

Have you ever actually used crypto to buy something? The transaction fees are exorbitant and prohibitive, and it's slow as balls.

That depends on the currency you use. I've only ever used Monero and the transfer fees are fractions of a cent.

Re: Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”

#100

Post by gingerlime »

zuzululu wrote: post #92
gingerlime wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. 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 ignore…

Stripe 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.

Agree 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.

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