Chargeback hell and CCBill
 

Ok, chargebacks have never been a problem for me. I've had maybe 2-3 in the past 12 months, but recently I had one that just blew me away.

I had a member at one of my sites since October 2004. This person managed to chargeback EVERYTHING since signing up. That's 5 months worth of rebills.

CCBill told me there is nothing they can do about since all the member had to do was convince the CC company that the charges were fraudalent.

Here's where I get pissed off. You mean to tell me that this person had no clue that for the past 5 months his CC was being billed $29.95. At best, this person was a fuckin moron. At worst, this person is a crook and managed to use my site for 5 months free of charge.

I guard my CC with my life. I check my online statement every week. There is no way my CC could be billed 5 months in a row without me noticing it.

Now for CCBill, do they not attempt to dispute these chargebacks? Isn't there a protocol between CCBill / Visa / CC company that says how the hell can a person, for whatever reason, allow 5 months worth of "unauthorized" transactions go undetected?

I don't get it and somebody failed me bigtime. Any thoughts?

|angry|

Sugar coated version... "insert 4 page rant on scamming surfers here"

Between the eyes version... It sucks but it happens and there is little you can affordably do about it. You prolly feel like fucked by a train right now and that's last thing you want to hear but been there too, as have alot of folks. Hope that one will be your last but longer you have sites and bigger member base you get, the more likely you'll see this happening again.

I think a lot of the processing companies are too scared to cause shit with the CC companies so they just roll over & let them charge back & refund any moron that's wife found out he was looking at porn for 5 months.

I can accept chargebacks of 1 or 2 months worth of transactions. I can accept a chargeback every x amount of sales.

This scenario is hard to accept. I have some customers who've been with me since late 2003. Can they chargeback 1 1/2 years worth of transactions?

I just finished working a temp job for bank of america in their credit card fraud atm diivision and it all depends on the amount of fraud claims over the past year the card holder has had. Also they will go back 6 months but that takes a lot of bull shitting on the card holders part. I saw tons of disputed reoccuring claims and lots were being denied and lots were charged back. I can say that if they get away with it once, very hard to get away with it twice. Especially if its claimed on the same merchant.

Not sure HOW far exactly - but I've heard of chargebacks going back further than 6 months... it sucks, but that's the way of the cc world. It's not CCBill - it's like that with all of them. It's out of their hands.

I had a charge show up on my cc statement once that I didn't remember what it was. I called the cc company and they asked me straight off, "Could this be an internet related charge? If so, you are not responsible if you don't remember it and we can charge it back for you. Do you know about chargebacks?"

I was shocked... she solicited ME to charge it back and call it fraud... WTF?

Once we finally found out what it was, not only was it not Internet-related but it was an actual charge hub had made at a retail store. So it was totally valid and not something that should be even instigating a charge over.

A little off the subject of multiple-month chargebacks, but that pissed me off.

|headbang|

I have seen many cases of WMs complaining that they have gotten hit with CBs for long term surfers.

The CC companies just roll over and give them their money back. Also you notice that the Verified-By-Visa is not available for adult sites.

Wonder what would happen if one of the sponsors started dragging people into small claims court and proved that they were ripping off the sites.

Can just see the headlines:
"Local man loses $xxx dollars in court over payment dispute with online porn company!" |shocking|

Might cut the chargebacks, but, might cut the sales also.

You will see no changes in charge backs for adult sites until processors are able to get some kind of a signature someway somehow. if ccbill or who else ever is able to have a popup that pops up on monitor for surfer to sign then all sorts of shit changes by the law. if you have a signature of any sort u do not have chargeback rights.
remember banks make more money by denying vesus a chargeback, because of the cost of manpower doing chargebacks. but as long as adult sites sell product with no signature there will be chargebacks.

In all fairness, though it's already been said but warrants saying again - this is in no way CCBill's (or any processor's) fault.

A few of you have said it in so many words but let me give you the short and dirty of it: An unsigned contract isn't worth the paper that it's printed on!

And that's exactly what you have with an internet transaction. The exception to this is when you are selling a product that is delivered and the UPS/FedEx shipment is signed for. Then and only then do you have a case to dispute a chargeback. If I had a nickel for everytime I heard from a webmaster about being able to prove it with their server logs, this post would be a figment of your imagination. Server logs just show that a particular ip address accessed your server. That, in and of itself doesn't prove that the cardholder was sitting at that computer at that time.

The Credit Card companies want their customers to feel good (so they keep using their credit card) and they figure the chance of anyone being able to prove that it was indeed their precious credit card holder who made the charge is about .0000001% so why not just keep the (credit card) customer happy and reverse the charge.

Face it guys and gals, chargebacks are (at this point) a cost of doing business on the internet just as shoplifting is in retail.

Also, 6 months is about as far back as the CC companies will go unless the customer has a REALLY GOOD song and dance and boy can they come up with some doozzies!

We started out with a pay site...spanking....the second year, which was...let's see ...2000.....some idiot charged back 8 months. And, there wasn't thing one we could do about it.

Hi Darryl, good post. |thumb

what would happen if paysites:

log every member activity (downloads, logins, etc.) with proper ip and can prove that person was using the site actively for months and now is fraudulently charging back a couple of months? is there a change to win in court or not? surely the hassles would not be worth it, but could one win?

As DMc says it would be almost impossible to prove it as fraud.

Now, in small claims court or a civil action, the burden of proof is not as high.

If you only dragged a couple of these scum into court, the publicity would probably cut CBs quite a bit.

that totally sucks. there should be a cut off. if these scammers are paying their credit card bills then they will see the charge. i'd say the most you can get back is 2 months worth of charges. if you are supposedly that stupid not realize it for 8 months then you deserve it |devil|

In the UK now in most retailers we don’t sign anything for a cc transaction we use 'chip and pin' which is basically a 4 digit code typed into a keypad in a similar way to on ATMs. It is meant to make fraud harder as it is not physically printed on the card. If it works in the real world and is classed as a signed completed transaction why should it not be used on the net?
If it cuts fraud hopefully cheating chargebacks would be less readily available and all those caught out husbands will just have to blame it on the kids again.

Problem is that you have to prove the IP address was allocated to a particular user. For that you need cooperation of the user's ISP who would most likely say show me a court order that I have to give you this information. On top of that, you may even have proxies and relaying to deal with in which it becomes more and more difficult to "pin" it to a particular user.

Hi Verbal, thanks. |waves|

I wrote a one-off script for a client specifically to address this issue. With GeoLocation, and logs that show that the IP that was used for signup and subsequent accesses are close to the location, we have about a 55% success rate in combatting chargebacks. Typical cardholder response, 'Well, I didn't recognize the charge, I guess it was me -- but I was never told it would rebill'.

We've done everything to make sure the receipts go out, a non 800# is listed in the descriptor, a short domain name is used in the descriptor, emails are answered promptly, customer service is dealt with internally rather than trusting the third party and it has taken one client from getting the black-letter at 6% to just below 1.5% right now. I imagine we'll have them at .9% and off probation soon.

We can pretty easily spot the transactions that are fraud versus legit by looking at various data that tells the client whether it is even worth pursuing. They include a printout, the signup information, the reverse and whois info and fight the ones that are worth fighting.

I can't imagine a 3rd party processor taking the time to do it, but, it has resulted in a pretty nice chunk of money that didn't go back when a surfer decided he didn't want to pay.

Using a pin code, no different than the CVV # which isn't in the magnetic stripe. With phishing techniques, they'll just ask for that piece of info.

Shame you cant have an email associated to a credit card and then the confirmation/password info goes through to that rather than any random one given on sign-up