Hey, 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.
All 3 of those identifiers can be easily changed by advanced users. I'm curious what you mean by fingerprint their access. Is this like an on demand fingerprinting, I've only seen browser fingerprinting as a tracker for every user.
Just force 3d secure, as it shifts the liability to the customer's bank. Most people don't mind opening their banking app on the phone for confirming the transaction if they really want the product for itseprice.
if customer fraudulently claims to their bank that they haven’t received the product, the bank files a chargeback and 3DS does not protect the merchant against it.
That'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.
It is at least very simple to implement. It's a simple API. Useful capability for banning abusive users too if you have social elements or other abuse vectors besides payment.
This comment struck a nerve with me and perhaps you didn't mean it in this way but:
Yes, many of us are incredibly responsive to customer support inquiries (I have a <1hr response time unless you send in a ticket when I'm sleeping) and it doesn't matter. Fraudsters gonna fraud. This isn't a case of "they asked for a refund, we refused, they issued a chargeback", it's a case of a scammer being a POS.
I've dealt with my fair share of chargebacks and in every case I've seen it's someone being a jerk and never a legit case.
The fact that Stripe won't help you, the banks don't care about all the evidence you have, and you end up out the money for the product _and_ you get hit with a chargeback fee on top of it is madness. I could literally have video of the person holding up their ID saying "I XXXXX agree to pay YYYY" and banks would still side with a the scummy scammers.
I have, quite literally, never had someone reach out via support and then file a chargeback later. They do it without reaching out, probably because they are a trash person and they have no interest in getting anything fixed and are just scammers.
Yeah, I know chargebacks are a frequent vector for abuse and of course I don't mean to imply that customers doing chargebacks ought to always implicitly be given the benefit of the doubt.
Given that you are responsive to inquiries, it makes sense that you'd rarely if ever have a legitimate chargeback -- because there's no reason for a customer to resort to chargebacks if the vendor is willing to work with them to resolve legitimate issues.
But I know of many examples of people needing to resort to chargebacks due to ineffectual customer support, and then having their accounts banned and being cut off from other unrelated services from the same vendor as a result. I don't think that's an appropriate response and vendors should be careful not to let that happen if they instate such a policy.
> 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.
No. I would have been far more upset about a vague response. I was still upset that they don't do anything about it.
(it took a bit of back-n-forth to get a clear answer, but I did get a clear one. Their support is still excellent from my experience and communicate well)
>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.
No. 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.
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 ignored.
No, Stripe did. It is a common misconception that chargebacks are decided by the customer's bank. Actually, there is a multiple cycle back-and-forth process after which they are finally decided by _the network_.
I have worked in card issuing for years and I have seen various submissions by merchants I know that use Stripe where I _know_ that they have an absolute winning case under the network rules that Stripe refuse to contest.
Stripe have decided that fighting most chargebacks is not worth the money, probably becasue they can just pass the costs onto the merchants and let them eat them and the merchants will not go elsewhere.
That’s news to me. Stripe always presents it as if they’re simply a conduit and it’s all in the issuing bank’s hands. Do you have any links/info for learning more about it?
> it could also be fraught if Stripe was in the business of blocking customers from their entire network based on one vendor's complaint
“You probably don’t want a system where one annoyed merchant can get someone blocked across the whole Stripe payment system. But there’s a pretty big gap between “automatically block this person everywhere” and “thanks for the screenshots, please consider Radar”, and this is where it gets frustrating.”
There is no gap between those things. Any fraud signal at all either causes people to get blocked, then it's a cross-merchant block, or it doesn't cause people to get blocked, then it's useless.
I 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.
At 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.
I 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.
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 <acquirer> merchants this year"?
I don't know this is the reason, but if I were asked to build such a system, I'd be pretty worried that it constitutes a consumer report under the terms of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Certainly I wouldn't want the inevitable news drama about it. "I'm just a poor innocent grandma, I'm a trusting person when it comes to Facebook ads, and Stripe punished me for getting scammed by banning me from half the stores on the Internet!"
If your card is actually stolen then you should have the card number changed to prevent additional fraud and then the disputes would be against the old card number rather than the new one, right?
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.
Stripe can’t do anything per the way CCs work. Asking for that to change is a big ask. Asking my vendor to help me not do business with people who are likely to scam me is a smaller one.
Genuinely 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"?
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.
Solid 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.
Stripe obviously records data around friendly fraud, (At minimum they implement 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.
Happy to share their responses verbatim. It was a rather long back-n-forth. Here's a snippet from the latest email, which I think makes it clear that they do not use the evidence I provided:
I can assure you that I will take note of your feedback and pass it to our team. Your point about post-transaction abuse detection is valid - while Stripe has robust network-level fraud detection, there does appear to be a gap in utilizing merchant-provided evidence of confirmed fraud to protect the broader merchant ecosystem. This type of feedback from merchants who have direct evidence is valuable for improving these systems.
The problem is that, as patio11 once described in detail (https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...), there are genuine tradeoffs here that people get outraged by the mention of. How many legitimate sales should Stripe block in order to more effectively fight this kind of fraud? Merchants don't want to hear it, and consumers don't either. So financial companies invariably conclude that it's better to raise the question only in careful, indirect ways which could not be misinterpreted as a statement that fraud is good or OK or acceptable.
That link says the customer's undisputed transactions 4 - 12 months ago with you may establish their disputed transaction was actually legitimate, but the article is about someone who only made disputed purchases within a week or two.
> Stripe obviously records data around friendly fraud
My only nit with Stipe is they don't allow me to delete card details for an ongoing subscription I don't plan to renew and already set it not to renew on the service billing page.
What'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?
The 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.
One 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.
I’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.
I 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).
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.
i 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.
There 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.
I 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.
none 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.
All 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.
None 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.
Certain 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.
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.
The strongest signal is whether they use an eBank/app that has a one-click button to report transactions as fraudulent. The Apple card(?) seems especially prevalent.
not to mention, thats pretty bad advice for these chargeback frauds. not gonna deny some regions have higher risk of frauds, but these are mostly high-volume automated schemes.
in the case of these "friendly fraud" schemes, they are much more likely to come from more developed regions with strong consumer protection laws like the NA.
if anything in many of those "high risk" regions, chargeback are much less common because fewer consumer protection law e.g. banks would automatically reject chargebacks for transactions with 3DS OTP.
My only experience as a European is that I called the support number on my card, they fixed the in 5 minutes, cancelled my card, sent me a new one and set me up with a temporary one.
I'm no longer convinced those high trust societies will remain so. Every high trust society has been pushed to opened it's doors wide and the changes have been stark.
I went down a bit of a search looking for counter evidence that crypto is likely less available to them, and it turns out both perspectives are true depending on the scale you look at. At the micro-level, survey data from emerging markets[0] confirms that crypto offers immunity against institutional failure and inflationary currency.
But this QJE article[1] argues there's a ceiling to how far things scale. Concluding that the cost to keep a decentralized network secure scales with its total economic value. So while there is immediate value to it's user, it might not scale well, and can't replace a country's financial system anyway because securing it at a sovereign scale would just be more expensive.
I dont follow. If regular finance to a country is that much distanced from global financial oversight and treaties where crypto (with awful spreads) becomes the norm that doesnt necessarily mean they are victims of international financial order but that regular financially modeling simply cannot manage their unique risk characteristics
I 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.
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.
A 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.
I 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.
A 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.
Stripe 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.
"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.
What 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.
If 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.
I 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.
Nothing, 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.
That'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.
When 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.
Yeah 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).
I 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.
tl;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.
Hey, 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.
I 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.
Exploiters easily get around this. its a small group of people doing all of the abuse.
All 3 of those identifiers can be easily changed by advanced users. I'm curious what you mean by fingerprint their access. Is this like an on demand fingerprinting, I've only seen browser fingerprinting as a tracker for every user.
if i had a dollar for every time a developer “perfect is the enemy of good”’d me
Nice try, chargebacker! ;)
I try to pay with Monero, so I can't chargeback :)
Just force 3d secure, as it shifts the liability to the customer's bank. Most people don't mind opening their banking app on the phone for confirming the transaction if they really want the product for itseprice.
if customer fraudulently claims to their bank that they haven’t received the product, the bank files a chargeback and 3DS does not protect the merchant against it.
most banks refuse chargebacks from 3ds transactions
Use DeviceCheck if iOS app too. Uber does this to ban across accounts
Great, 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?
That'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.
It is at least very simple to implement. It's a simple API. Useful capability for banning abusive users too if you have social elements or other abuse vectors besides payment.
I imagine most fraudsters wouldn't be using iOS. I'm curious if the android app fingerprinting solutions go cross user profile.
As far as I know, DRM systems like Widewine have IDs that cross user profile lines.
You'd better be promptly responsive to legitimate customer support inquiries if you are going to have a policy like that
This comment struck a nerve with me and perhaps you didn't mean it in this way but:
Yes, many of us are incredibly responsive to customer support inquiries (I have a <1hr response time unless you send in a ticket when I'm sleeping) and it doesn't matter. Fraudsters gonna fraud. This isn't a case of "they asked for a refund, we refused, they issued a chargeback", it's a case of a scammer being a POS.
I've dealt with my fair share of chargebacks and in every case I've seen it's someone being a jerk and never a legit case.
The fact that Stripe won't help you, the banks don't care about all the evidence you have, and you end up out the money for the product _and_ you get hit with a chargeback fee on top of it is madness. I could literally have video of the person holding up their ID saying "I XXXXX agree to pay YYYY" and banks would still side with a the scummy scammers.
I have, quite literally, never had someone reach out via support and then file a chargeback later. They do it without reaching out, probably because they are a trash person and they have no interest in getting anything fixed and are just scammers.
Yeah, I know chargebacks are a frequent vector for abuse and of course I don't mean to imply that customers doing chargebacks ought to always implicitly be given the benefit of the doubt.
Given that you are responsive to inquiries, it makes sense that you'd rarely if ever have a legitimate chargeback -- because there's no reason for a customer to resort to chargebacks if the vendor is willing to work with them to resolve legitimate issues.
But I know of many examples of people needing to resort to chargebacks due to ineffectual customer support, and then having their accounts banned and being cut off from other unrelated services from the same vendor as a result. I don't think that's an appropriate response and vendors should be careful not to let that happen if they instate such a policy.
> 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.
No. I would have been far more upset about a vague response. I was still upset that they don't do anything about it.
(it took a bit of back-n-forth to get a clear answer, but I did get a clear one. Their support is still excellent from my experience and communicate well)
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.
I don't see many people upset at Stripe over this, I certainly am not.
No. 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.
Sounds like your projecting a bit.
Then it's probably worth being aware that you're an outlier, because companies sure aren't being vague for the hell of it.
They're doing it because of a preceived result, not an actual result.
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 ignored.
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.
No, Stripe did. It is a common misconception that chargebacks are decided by the customer's bank. Actually, there is a multiple cycle back-and-forth process after which they are finally decided by _the network_.
I have worked in card issuing for years and I have seen various submissions by merchants I know that use Stripe where I _know_ that they have an absolute winning case under the network rules that Stripe refuse to contest.
Stripe have decided that fighting most chargebacks is not worth the money, probably becasue they can just pass the costs onto the merchants and let them eat them and the merchants will not go elsewhere.
That’s news to me. Stripe always presents it as if they’re simply a conduit and it’s all in the issuing bank’s hands. Do you have any links/info for learning more about it?
> it could also be fraught if Stripe was in the business of blocking customers from their entire network based on one vendor's complaint
“You probably don’t want a system where one annoyed merchant can get someone blocked across the whole Stripe payment system. But there’s a pretty big gap between “automatically block this person everywhere” and “thanks for the screenshots, please consider Radar”, and this is where it gets frustrating.”
There is no gap between those things. Any fraud signal at all either causes people to get blocked, then it's a cross-merchant block, or it doesn't cause people to get blocked, then it's useless.
I 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.
At 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.
That’s just the nature of these industries.
1) Incumbent is slow, clunky, unpleasant to deal with due to years of accumulated constraints to deal with
2) Newcomer can differentiate themselves by being nimble and pleasant to work with, taking market share
3) Over time newcomer has to deal with increasing amount of scrutiny, fraud, overhead, CYA type practices, etc
4) Newcomer is now incumbent, goto 1)
Who do you recommend as an alternative?
Nowpayments is good for an easy crypto payment gateway.
No affiliation, I've just seen them used–it would be better if you self-hosted a BTCPay server.
I 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.
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 <acquirer> merchants this year"?
I don't know this is the reason, but if I were asked to build such a system, I'd be pretty worried that it constitutes a consumer report under the terms of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Certainly I wouldn't want the inevitable news drama about it. "I'm just a poor innocent grandma, I'm a trusting person when it comes to Facebook ads, and Stripe punished me for getting scammed by banning me from half the stores on the Internet!"
If your card is actually stolen then you should have the card number changed to prevent additional fraud and then the disputes would be against the old card number rather than the new one, right?
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.
Stripe can’t do anything per the way CCs work. Asking for that to change is a big ask. Asking my vendor to help me not do business with people who are likely to scam me is a smaller one.
claim 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?
It matched their LinkedIn photo.
Their business model is to allow as many possible "valid" transactions, not to serve their "clients". They're a PSP...
This is just fraud.
"Friendly fraud" is accidental or with the correct intentions – such as the customer not recognising the charge and charging back.
Genuinely 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"?
This is the point. You could file criminal charges. You could win in civil court.
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.
They 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.
Solid 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.
Stripe obviously records data around friendly fraud, (At minimum they implement 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.
Happy to share their responses verbatim. It was a rather long back-n-forth. Here's a snippet from the latest email, which I think makes it clear that they do not use the evidence I provided:
Theres no gotchas in the quoted text, but curious if you got the impression from your emails that any of it was.. AI generated?
The camber, affirmation, word choice, triplet phrase... leaves me wondering. But without a smoking gun its hard to know if a model call was fired.
> I suspect they were saying something carefully noncommittal and legally compliant to get you to go away
If their total dismissal of the problem is itself deception, that's not a particularly big improvement!
The problem is that, as patio11 once described in detail (https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...), there are genuine tradeoffs here that people get outraged by the mention of. How many legitimate sales should Stripe block in order to more effectively fight this kind of fraud? Merchants don't want to hear it, and consumers don't either. So financial companies invariably conclude that it's better to raise the question only in careful, indirect ways which could not be misinterpreted as a statement that fraud is good or OK or acceptable.
That link says the customer's undisputed transactions 4 - 12 months ago with you may establish their disputed transaction was actually legitimate, but the article is about someone who only made disputed purchases within a week or two.
> Stripe obviously records data around friendly fraud
My only nit with Stipe is they don't allow me to delete card details for an ongoing subscription I don't plan to renew and already set it not to renew on the service billing page.
What'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?
The 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.
One 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.
Does Stripe have any published stats on the ratios? Did any merchant ever won such a Stripe dispute?
I’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.
I 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).
Correct, 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.
So I can crack open a Backwoods, stick my weed in there, and then glue back together with Ciglue? That's pretty cool.
Thank 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.
i 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.
There 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.
I 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.
none 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.
All 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.
None 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.
Certain 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.
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 trust societies rarely transform into high trust society.
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.
+1 almost all from the US.
The strongest signal is whether they use an eBank/app that has a one-click button to report transactions as fraudulent. The Apple card(?) seems especially prevalent.
not to mention, thats pretty bad advice for these chargeback frauds. not gonna deny some regions have higher risk of frauds, but these are mostly high-volume automated schemes.
in the case of these "friendly fraud" schemes, they are much more likely to come from more developed regions with strong consumer protection laws like the NA.
if anything in many of those "high risk" regions, chargeback are much less common because fewer consumer protection law e.g. banks would automatically reject chargebacks for transactions with 3DS OTP.
13 over 4 years is tiny sample compared to what I've seen on international scale.
Great advice which is why data is what I'm relying on vs anecdotes.
How big is your business and where does it sell?
One chargeback a quarter is a lot, depending.
Yeah, all my chargebacks are Americans. Realtors are the worst.
Just because the card is US-based doesn't mean the user is.
This case was Canada.
The US and I imagine Canada are known for the ease of chargebacks.
My experience in Europe is that it's a very tough process to even initiate (as a consumer)
My only experience as a European is that I called the support number on my card, they fixed the in 5 minutes, cancelled my card, sent me a new one and set me up with a temporary one.
I'm no longer convinced those high trust societies will remain so. Every high trust society has been pushed to opened it's doors wide and the changes have been stark.
Accept crypto for those countries, it doesn't have chargebacks and helps those vulnerable to the financial system.
I went down a bit of a search looking for counter evidence that crypto is likely less available to them, and it turns out both perspectives are true depending on the scale you look at. At the micro-level, survey data from emerging markets[0] confirms that crypto offers immunity against institutional failure and inflationary currency.
But this QJE article[1] argues there's a ceiling to how far things scale. Concluding that the cost to keep a decentralized network secure scales with its total economic value. So while there is immediate value to it's user, it might not scale well, and can't replace a country's financial system anyway because securing it at a sovereign scale would just be more expensive.
[0]: https://www.mdpi.com/1911-8074/17/10/467 [1]: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/140/1/1/7824430
I dont follow. If regular finance to a country is that much distanced from global financial oversight and treaties where crypto (with awful spreads) becomes the norm that doesnt necessarily mean they are victims of international financial order but that regular financially modeling simply cannot manage their unique risk characteristics
Have you ever actually used crypto to buy something? The transaction fees are exorbitant and prohibitive, and it's slow as balls.
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
>"Again and again I'm reminded why high trust societies remain high trust and why low trust societies rarely transform into high trust society."
Outside of South Korea, from enormous help from Pax Americana, has it ever happened?
I was told by someone in the industry that New Zealand leads the pack for travelling outside NZ and coming home to refute charges.
> I'm not going to name those countries outright
Why?
I would assume it’s not that relevant to the advice. And people will always argue about the countries if you list them.
X isn’t bad. You should include Y. You only added/omitted Z because of $stereotype/$racistView/$otherAllegation.
Probably just not worth the hassle.
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Why do you not want to name them?
It makes the conversation turn into an electromagnet for racists.
You can’t ignore the stereotypes, but you can let people figure it out themselves. You don’t have to say it when it’s already obvious.
That's very lazy and unfriendly against people who are not fraudsters.
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I think you've done a good job of answering why.
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I 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.
I thought that banks were less likely to side with the customer compared with credit cards.
Most credit cards are issued by banks.
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.
A 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.
Use EMV 3DS 2.x authentication with liability shift protection?
I 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.
A 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.
Stripe 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.
Is the usage-based pricing of Signifyd et al cheaper than using 3D secure? What about "micro" transactions?
To 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?
"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.
What 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.
? in on what?
If 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.
Have 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.
I 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.
If they are using the same name, address. Why not just flag the "friendly fraud" before fulfilling it?
Then what are the better alternatives?
Nothing, 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/
Monero or honestly any crypto. There's no chargebacks and it can be more private.
That'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.
"No chargebacks" means you'll have a very hard time attracting new customers, though, as bootstrapping trust is much harder that way.
In fact it can be so private you'll never know who the merchant who didn't send you the product is.
Don't most crypto exchanges ban Monero?
Isn't this a property (and longstanding value judgement) of the entire payment card ecosystem?
When 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.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra... Classic patio11 article.
>And the bank, naturally, sided with them.
How is it natural if DHL had proof of delivery.
I guess DHL had proof of delivery of a box.
Yeah 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).
I 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.
Signifyd (company) solves this issue.
how so?
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
I was so annoyed with their onboarding for new accts I moved to Square on every project. Love it! Never going back
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tl;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.