Chargeback questions.....CCbill grrrrr
 

Hey everyone. Hope you all had a great Christmas!

I finally had a chance to sit down and review chargebacks. One thing I'm noticing is that many chargebacks are repeated like this:

0001-anna-angel.com

2012-02-01 01:39:17

chargeback

SC

United States

Shannon

Roberts

[email protected]

0111257301000013492

$29.99

$0.00

N

USD


0001-anna-angel.com

2012-02-01 01:39:38

chargeback

SC

United States

Shannon

Roberts

[email protected]

0111287501000013393

$29.99

$0.00

N

USD


0001-anna-angel.com

2012-02-01 01:39:41

chargeback

SC

United States

Shannon

Roberts

[email protected]

0111317701000013085

$29.99

$0.00

N

USD


0001-anna-angel.com

2012-02-01 01:39:35

chargeback

SC

United States

Shannon

Roberts

[email protected]

0112012401000013435

$29.99

$0.00

N

USD

Question is why in the world would people sign up to a site just to chargeback over and over and over on the same date? Second question is why does CCbill allow this to happen??? I see dozens of examples of this alone in my chargebacks. What I am noticing from looking at these accounts is that I would say 80% of my chargebacks are coming from fraud. When I ask CCbill to help out their response seems to be along the lines of "sorry it's out of our hands" Just by looking at these fraudulent accounts I can determine a pattern. From this pattern a programmer can take at most 30 minutes to implement a script that weeds out the frauds. I won't say much more about it since I know these assholes (pirates etc) read this forum often. But what I want to know is why the fuck CCbill doesn't step up!? Yet they have the nerve to email me asking ME to see what I can do to bring down my chargeback rate. Meanwhile it can probably drop by 80% if they would actually start doing something about their broken system that apparently a child can defraud. I'm really getting sick of ccbill's inability to go an extra mile for it's clients that pay them thousands of dollars each year in fees so the owners can go buy jets instead of reinvesting into a proper admin and a secure system that actually feels like 2012.

You should edit the customers name and email out of your post.

I should if it were a real account/ person. I actually think we should all start a compiled blacklist of these and share them online so all webmasters can prevent these from ending up on their sites. But that's a whole other topic.

Hi AnnAngel,

I think you have it wrong. All of charge chargebacks happened on the same date, but if you look at the transaction numbers, they are very far apart. What I think happened is that this was a monthly recurring customer of yours, and this person charged back all purchases at the same time.


It is not CCBill's fault, and it is wrong to blame them. Trust me, I know.

Here is an idea for you that we ourselves use as a part of our own fraud system : Contact your customers.

It may sound scary at first, but do it. If you notice, the card holder's name is "Shannon R.", a woman's name. Everyone knows that relatively few women buy porn, so what you want to do is scan your list of customers often and look for a womans name. When you see it, CALL HER. That's right, Call her.

When you call the customer, let her know you're from "Customer Service". What you are trying to determine is if she was the one who actually made the purchase, but do while being on her side. If she did not make the purchase, it means someone stole her card info and used it without her approval.

When you determine this, you must login to your CCBill account and either Void the transaction, or issue a refund.

Voiding a transaction is always better. It means you stopped the transaction before it got to Visa or Mastercard, and you have saved yourself the cost of a chargeback. Visa will love you, and CCBill will love you too. This makes you a good merchant.

If it's too late for a void, a Refund is good too.

When you look at your user list, check the IP address with any Geo site, and see if the IP Address kinda sorta lines up with the home address of the credit card holder. If they are neaby (same city, province or state) you are probably ok. If its a different state or country, contact the card holder BY PHONE and verify they made the purchase. (If not, see above). You can't email the person because the email is not associated with her credit card bill.

As it is too late for "Shannon", there's nothing you can do. But if you want to, call her anyway, and ask her if she made the purchase and if so, why she charged back. If she didn't make the purchase, maybe she will have a good story of fraud at least. Very often, its a family member that steals the card info to buy porn.

Sorry to hear about your chargebacks. Good luck!

No, I don't think that would be a good idea. The card info is private to begin with and sharing private information is illegal. Plus, not all chargebacks are fraudulent. If a customer purchases unsatisfactory service charges it back, that doesn't make him fraud.

Most excellent advice {about contacting the customer initially}...I do that quite often myself.
{and I believe you're correct about the transaction info she posted...multiple chargebacks on same date}

doh Bart! Write to mods to delete users name and email.

This guy's wife has found these recurring charges on her credit card statement, made chargeback for all and divorced him. ;)

Lmao crocmint.

Mark the issue I have with ccbill is that a simple script on their end could weed out the signups BEFORE they even hit. I should not have to sit and review all my signups on a daily basis if a simple script on their side would do the task very effectively.

Call customers? Look at my site policy lol. We call and review customers! Again something that can't be done all day every day. But the new method of calling has provided some great results in tracking fraudulent accounts. But it's not enough. Ccbill needs to step up and help. Only so much I can do on my end.

How amazing would it be if ccbill actually fed the users IP address to our server for example and this way our server can check if the current login is from the same vicinity. I am seeing so many accounts registered in the us but the person is logging in from Europe. This should be an automatic block and such a simple thing to accomplish if ccbill would actually help out. Instead...nothing. These are the kinds of things I'm referring to but I don't want to discuss anymore measures here for obvious reasons.

Just record ips from the login and compare it to the location that ccbill has and manually review ones that don't match up well

My point is that this can easily be mostly automated with the help of ccbill. I don't know what's missing in my point here. Doing this manually really takes too many unnecessary resources.

I wish ccbill would scrub all female name card holders. A female name is a charge back waiting to happen. lol

I'm not sure what your point is.

CCBill already scrubs IP and compares to address on credit card. This also weeds out legit sales... i.e. the overseas military who use a credit card from their home country.

Like CCBILL said IF what you posted is one person charging back several months of rebills, nothing you can do.
I have said for years it should only count as one chargeback, but Nope...

Well ok, but lets think about this a second.... lets say someone steals your credit card from your wallet or online, but you don't notice it right away. The only time you would notice un authorized charges is when you get your statement in the mail. How would CCBill know for sure?

Also there are other threads on GFY where people complain about CCBill's scrub in that it is too tough, a direct opposite to your issue having it be too soft. Personally, I don't care how CCBill does it as long as it protects me from chargebacks as much as possible. It is afterall in everyone's best interest.

... and yes, you really should monitor your sales every day. Don't forget, that its actually you responsible for your account, not CCBill. So if you don't monitor, and if you don't handle chargebacks / frauds / refunds etc, CCBill can blame you and cut you off.

Do this : Contact your rep at CCBill, tell him about these chargebacks, and ask him what you can do as a merchant to minimize it. They may have some advice that differs from mine. I still think monitoring is important. It is simple to do and takes only a few minutes.

Plus don't forget that CCBill can post all kinds of details about the purchase to you. You can always write a script that can help you identify fraud such as some GeoIP matching, or create your own blacklist & whitelists and compare identifiers like names, email address, ip addresses etc against your own lists, etc.

Well actually, not ALL customers, but some. And don't forget, it's all in how you write it. When you call to verify a customer, you're doing it to protect yourself of course, but what you want to do is play-up the idea that you are protecting your customers from identify theft. How? When you call a customer, you are verifying that they made a purchase, and informing them when their card has been used without their permission. :)

Maybe not, but a quick scan of your daily sales takes a few seconds. And if you see a woman's name in your list, that is probably a fraud. Give her a call to confirm, and void the transaction within 24 hours saves you the much bigger cost of a chargeback and loss of your account.



CCBill, Epoch, Segpay etc all have similar issues and each have their own way of dealing with it. Contact your guy at CCBill and see what they have to say. Don't get me wrong, I am agreeing with you. If a biller comes up with someone new to avoid or prevent chargebacks, they will be the kings of the online billing world thats for sure.

Cheers!

They do!
They do this too! But actually believe it or not you sometimes want this feature disabled, especially if you are running a cam site. Normally, CCBill and others will not allow a customer to purchase more than once in 24 or 48 hours. This is ok for membership sites but bad for cam sites. This feature and others, can be adjusted and tweaked for you by all billers. Ask CCBill.

It is possible that the card holder can be on vacation when he buys or logs in (His home address is California, but he's visiting Florida for example). I'm not sure but I think you can ask CCBill to stop this from happening, but maybe you may not want to.


That would be interesting... I've wondered if this was possible myself. I think we get 1 female purchase a year. I'd have no problem blocking all female names.

ann angel u r a hottie :thumbsup

CCbill can send you all the signup info you need. It’s up to your sites membership software to grab that info from CCBill and use it as you see fit (example, signup in US through CCbill, switch to other country IP to download = ban.) Yes, not that difficult, but it’s up to you to do it. CCBill doesn’t monitor your site after first signup, so they will not know if your customers change IPs

Hey Ann I have a great solution to help with your chargebacks... :thumbsup

Hit me up when you get this...

My contact info is in sig... :pimp

You guys keep saying ccbill does these things but its the first time I'm hearing of it lol. How come when I message ccbill fraud they message me back not referring to any of this information.

If you know how to set up so my server checks the registered address of a user in ccbill against the current location of his ip please email me immediately! I could use help here. Ccbill sure hasn't illustrated any such method for me. [email protected]

Scanning my chargebacks 60% or more seem to be from women! Yes this is a simple fix using a script on ccbill end.

What would I like to see? How about scrubbing that we the clients can also have control over for starters? I should be able to log into ccbill and have a list of different methods at my disposal to select for managing my users. I didn't say ccbill should scrub more. I said I should be able to say hey scrub these names and they do it. Simple. Effective.

Further the blacklists should be "global". Shared amongst all sites. There is no reason someone should be able to join all my sites chargeback then join other sites from other studios then charge them back as well.

Mark don't be so quick to defend a company that has literally made millions off our backs and still has an admin area that feels like 2003. They provide no support whatsoever beyond their immediate duty. They are our user management. They are the first line of defense against fraud. If they don't do it properly then we get screwed. My sites are small compared to others which get thousands of signups daily. Are you really suggesting these webmasters go through each user individually to check for fraud on a daily basis? This should all be automated already! It's 2013!

You're such a fucking idiot.

..and why would anyone want to help your hard-headed ass? Get your head out of your ass and then maybe, just maybe someone would give you some help.

chargebacks are a bitch

i can say this because i ran ccbills fraud department for 7 years

banks can do what they want, when they want to, in some cases after refunds have been issued against the same charges, and its costly to argue against what the banks throw at you

but ccbill gets charged fines for chargebacks, which they don't pass onto the clients, so your interests are aligned and they do their best to stop them

Chargebacks are a bitch... the only person who wins is the person charging back and the bank charging back. Sometimes the processor will capitalize on chargeback fees and pass that onto the merchant, but you are right, ccbill does not pass that onto the merchant.

You guys are kidding when you say women always chargeback, right? Charge-backs suck, yes. But trying to say that women don't buy porn is like saying women don't buy condoms. Gotta be a moron to think that way. :2 cents:

Whether they buy porn or not is irrelevant. 90% or more of porn signups with a woman's name are going to be a chargeback.

If you don't want to review your transactions on a regular basis then you are never going to be able to get this under control, there just isn't any other way.

If you want greater control and visibility then you need to use Netbilling. CCBill is a great start but Netbilling has better features for being able to tune your fraud filters. As far as I know CCBill has none.

Also whenever you setup a filter to block potentially fraudulent transactions you are also going to be blocking a certain number of legit transactions as well. If you make it so tight that only positively genuine transactions can go through then your sales are going to drop like a rock, because there will be many genuine sales blocked as well. Once again, review your sales transactions daily, at least weekly if you are particularly lazy. I do mine every day over coffee and my various sites are doing over 100 transactions a day between sales and rebills. It doesn't take that long to scan down the list, and you learn a lot of things about your customers and affiliates you wouldn't know otherwise.

the email posted turns out to be an elementary school teacher who is married

http://www.facebook.com/kelley.kingvercellino

jailbait daughter looks a lot like ann angel as well, creepy.

It wouldn't have helped you here. "Shannon" is both a man's and a woman's name. Would CCBill want to turn down customers who happen to be named Kim or Evelyn? Kim Dotcom wouldn't be able to sign up, though he's a man, but neither would Evelyn Waugh (dead anyway) a famous British male author.

Add this to the fact that some Web sites, like mine, are popular among women. My site is softcore, with only women -- a penis free zone. It's true that some of the chargebacks I've gotten are with cardholders with obviously female names, the majority are still male names.

CCBill has fraud *score* filters where it'll reject signup attempts based on a variety of elements, not just one. Geo distance irregularities is only one element. Would you deny the poor soldier coming in on an Iraq or Germany or Japan IP even though he uses his hometown address for this credit card?

The fraudsters know they can sign up through a newly listed proxy, then access your site from their own IP where they have better bandwidth. So it really does have to come down to your site and server tools providing the extra fraud detection.

Most fraudulent signups eventually result in shared passwords. That's one thing you can look for as a clue. if you catch it early enough you might still be able to void the transaction (prior to CCbill settling the batch), and certainly stop it before it rebills.

Are we really reading a thread complaining that CCBill's scrub is too low?

1 org laugh

when did you stop working there?

july 12, 2012

13 years to the exact day i started back in '99

one of the reasons you see a high proportion of womans names in chargebacks is because the fraudsters will use cc lists from places that sell cds, clothing, retail goods, etc and those lists are relatively close to even womans/mens names

however, with the exception of certain niches like dating, mostly men buy porn, so it makes sense to be suspicious of sales that come from woman and that they are more likely to be fake transactions

actual womans sales are like 2-3% of many porn niches, id guess

Thanks pompousjohn for recommending us. We have 15 tools on the front end that each of our merchants have control over. So, if you want more control, flexibility and want to save $$$, please contact us for more information and a walkthrough of our system.

NETbilling is here to help.

Thanks, Mitch

if u see a womans name signup, check to see what their ip resolves too.. alot of times they come back from ghana or nigeria with an american address.

solo girl sites do tend to get alot of female signups because it tends to be alot softer porn then other niches

watch your declines, often they will try more then one name / address with the same email address before getting a working one or giving up

If you see multiple chargebacks in the same day from the same person, take a look in the CCBill admin at when they first signed up. Odds are good they were rebilling and charged back multiple months.

that rules for cb on long month memberships is such bullshit