What are effective ways of fighting chargeback fraud?

tl;dr I got a bunch of fraudulent chargebacks -- and lost disputes even where people acknowledged they made the chargeback by accident. What should I do differently to prevent / reduce this in the future?

Context: I'm one of the bunch of people for whom Prepfully is a weekend project. The primary paid service is a 1-1 mock interviews / coaching service.

The problem: Over the last 3 months, I received a bunch of "Transaction marked as fraudulent" chargebacks, from candidates who used the service. My volumes are small enough that I emailed each one of these users to check -- and they gave a range of reasons, from forgetting they used Prepfully, to having a credit card stolen, to just filing this chargeback accidentally. They also all promised to withdraw this chargeback.

However - I lost 2 / 4 such chargeback disputes. This is inspite of submitting the email thread (including where they acknowledged their mistake), as part of the evidence to dispute this chargeback. Naturally Stripe advises there is nothing they can do in this situation (I understand it is in the hands of the banks which issue these cards - Citi, JPM etc), rather than Stripe's.

What I already do: 1. If anyone cancels a session, they receive a refund. There are charges for last minute cancellations to avoid leaving coaches hanging out to dry -- but I have never received a chargeback in such a situation (I did receive two threats of chargebacks and just ate the cost myself rather than risk one, but by and large people are understanding) 2. If someone is unhappy either explicitly (eg. requests a refund) or implicitly (eg. gives a review of less than 3/5) - I email them to check what went wrong, and issue a refund 95% of the time. 3. When I do get a chargeback, I upload pretty much all evidence, including reviews the candidate / user has left, IP logs, emails they've sent me confirming the dispute was accidental or mistaken etc etc.

What I'm afraid of: 1. I sometimes lose disputes even where the user acknowledges their mistake 2. It seems even the disputes I win against the "I made a mistaken chargeback" category from credit card users, count against my chargeback rates. At my volumes even a small increase in chargeback volumes would basically get me suspended from Stripe.

Question to the community: What should I be doing differently? I will already be raising prices by about 3-5% to cover the risk of chargeback fraud (sadly this will be borne by legitimate customers, but I operate at break-even so paying this out of pocket is pretty painful). But is there any advice from the community on defending against this sort of friendly fraud?

If your service is marketed as 'Prepfully' and payments show as made to 'Prepfully' in customers' card/bank statements (That's very important as @smca highlighted) then I wouldn't believe a claim that the chargeback was accidental.

Likewise, if your service is indeed a "1-1 mock interviews / coaching service" then my reply to any claim that they "forgot they used the service" would be: "Pull the other one".

When they promised to withdraw the chargeback did they actually do it (you might not have any way to know)? My guess is that they didn't.

IMHO these were dishonest customers, and I would blacklist them to avoid repeats.

Now regarding your question specifically I think the only way is to understand why you lost and to beef up your evidence, processes, T&Cs, etc as needed. Unfortunetaly I do not have much insight in that.

Thanks for the very helpful response! Yep, it's for prepfully.com.

On 1 -- we don't have any subscriptions at the moment - everything is a transaction. We're planning to roll out a subscription/course module at some point next year, so definitely something to incorporate upfront when we do.

On 2 -- we actually send a "you've booked a session" email, 1 email reminder + 1 (opt-in only) whatsapp reminder pre-session, and 1 email 7-days post-session for feedback at the moment. I'm a bit worried about coming across as spammy if we send anything more. However, I don't send a "payment receipt" email at the moment, so that is perhaps something to explore.

On 3 -- all the chargebacks came from quite honest-seeming customers. After talking to them, it did feel like they made an honest mistake. I have a suspicion that some US banks make it incredibly easy to do a chargeback without asking for much evidence (I'm based in the Netherlands, where for instance you need to provide proof that you directly interacted with a merchant), so suggestion (5) in particular might be very relevant here.

On 4 -- super relevant, thanks! If I look at the first result at the moment it's quite misleading (we definitely allow for refunds), whereas what Google has indexed is the piece where we say "we won't issue a refund if you forget to join a session".

On 5 -- good idea too, and very actionable. We don't put anything beyond "PREPFULLY" at the moment. And our transaction IDs are hashes so they don't communicate much information. So maybe even putting something like "interview coaching" -- will have to see what I can fit, could help people remember.

Will also see how we can bolster our T&C. I'm guessing you meant this in context of winning a potential chargeback dispute? I'm not sure if this would actually reduce the total number of chargebacks.

Thanks for the suggestions, really appreciate it.

We're not something people use day-to-day, I think we're mostly just relevant in the 4-8 weeks someone's preparing for a job interview - so I can imagine people forgetting they used something called "PREPFULLY". After talking to these customers I got the sense they couldn't relate their card transaction to the service itself -- but once I sent an email they immediately remembered what it was. In this context smca's suggestion (4) and (5) could be quite useful - if people either Google Prepfully or if I can remind them of what it was within the transaction description - this could pre-empt a chargeback from those who read it.

Re: those who promised to withdraw - indeed, I don't have any way to know if they did do so. There's one chargeback which I "won" without even submitting evidence, so I think this is probably a clear case of it being withdrawn. There's one which I lost just a few hours ago, which triggered this post.

Re: blacklist - yeah I guess this is one way. Interestingly though, 2 of the customers actually immediately offered to pay again, to compensate for the lost revenue - which was both nice of them, and not aligned with the behavior of a someone dishonest. But it might well be worth it to prevent the risk of hitting the Visa/Mastercard threshold for chargebacks. I have a feeling it would be easy to get around though, if someone has the wrong intent they would probably just use a different email or card. Either way - I'll be pretty regretful about having to do this -- repeat bookers are basically our bread and butter - I discount all candidates' first bookings to super low margins as a conversion tactic (i.e. try out a mock interview to a low price) and even lose money on these sometimes. Which gets compensated by the 60-70% of all these users who end up booking additional sessions at the standard price - which is where Prepfully makes money. But probably not worth the risk of letting someone who has done one chargeback do additional ones.

Re: losses - unfortunately I don't get much information re: why we lost the dispute. Indeed the two things to probably work on are (a) more T&Cs and (b) more logs.

What does "Pull the other one" mean in reply to "forgot they used the service"?