Has anyone ever successfully challenged a chargeback?
 

For seven years I have accepted chargebacks as a fact of life in this business.

As our tools have evolved I can now prove that an individual has downloaded content, how much, when and to where. In other words I can prove delivery of what they bought.

I am seriously considering starting to fight some of the better documented chargebacks. Has anyone ever been successful in a chargeback dispute?

If so how did you win?

How do you plan on proving it was delivered to the owner of the credit card? How do you plan on fighting chargebacks for people that are just unsatisfied with the members area? Doesnt matter if they got it or not, if they arent satisfied, they can do a chargeback.

I've had maybe 10 chargebacks in 7 years.

Two of em' were content theives and it was easy to track them. All I did was then had the lawyers contact their parents and the shit was taken care of right there and then.

The other was a p2p'er. Fans caught him and cops nailed his dumb ass. His name even appeared in his town news police blotter. Yep, I got a very lengthy 'apology'.

So if someone buys a dishwasher and they are not satisfied with it, they can do a chargeback?

I do chargebacks to my own sites all the time!

Shit, every time I buy a membership to my trans site and find out that they are girls with dicks I get so dissapointed!

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

umm yes. since its physical they will have to give it back though. its meant to be protection from stores that have no return policies.

they have to abide by the return policy of the store.
visa/mc do no guarantee satisfaction with the merchandise.

a customer cannot chargeback because he isn't satisfied with the content on the site.
he can chargeback if the site isn't as described. if your tour says ten thousand pictures and you only have 1000 pictures, the customer can chargeback.

same thing applies to the dishwasher. if the box claims it has this feature and the feature when it really doesn't, the customer can chargeback for "merchandise not as described".

yes! successfully on several occassions. helps to have a customers full info and then send them a legal letter. if they dont respond to that, the phone calls start and all of their paperwork is sent to their home registered mail. however, when you tell them that you are doing this, they usually pay up. :winkwink:

here is a good list of chargeback reasons:

http://www.atlanticpayment.com/cardterms/chargeback.htm

chances of you successfully fighting a chargeback for an online sale: .0001%

i think he was talking about fighting the chargeback thru visa/mc.

sure, a lot of customers may give you the cash afterwards, but they may not pay the chargeback fees. it also doesn't change your chargeback ratio.

detoxed is pretty much correct. like i've said many times before (but no one seems to want to believe it), you cannot prove the cardholder did the charge unless you can trace the IP address from your logs back to his computer.

as far as i know, the only legal way to do that is to get that information from his ISP. and they won't give you that info without a subpoena. good luck getting one.

I suspected this was the reality.

i would get the cb fee too :winkwink:

youre right though, if you are dealing with a straight membership site, then it will be next to impossible. i had a pay per minute site a while back which kept logs of everything from the free chat on up. when someone wanted to charge back, i would email my rep, fax the info in and mail it so show who did what, at what time, with what card, from what ip and so forth. it got to the point that they asked me to stop faxing and emailing...lol

if you can get logs, then you have a leg to stand on however, if you get someone on the other end that has had a bad day, you can pretty much forget it.

the logs can help you pressure many cardholders into dropping the chargeback, or sending you cash for the membership. but very few banks will allow you to represent the chargebacks with them.

when customers call me to initiate a chargeback, i tell them that we'll get the transaction details and i bullshit them by telling "the website in question will provide us with the IP address of the person who signed up" and when they ask what an IP address is, i tell them "it's a unique number that gets assigned to a computer when it connects to the net and can be traced".
a lot of people change their mind about the chargeback, or they proceed with it, but call us 5 days later to cancel it.

if you bought 24 pack of beer and drank half of it and tried to return it becuase you didn't like it.. you couldn't.. they are doing the same type of shit when they charge back a site for not liking it..if they really didn't like it they should of canceled the site within an hour of purchasing it.. that is a little more reasonable.. not 2 -3 months later after logging in daily viewing shit for hours.. you get what you pay for.. if everything on the tour matches up what is really inside of the members area they shouldnt' be able to charge back for that.. they use up bandwidth.. same as drinking half the case of beer..

visa and mastercard has to set a limit on the amount of charge backs you can do.. it is sooo easy to just cancel your credit card and get a new one re issue'd.. (just did it today cuase i've bought alot of shit on the internet with it) then your not black listed on any sites anymore.. able to scam everyone once again until your black listed and just keep doing it.. it will never stop unless visa/mc steps up and does something about it.

obviously, you don't know how to read.
a customer cannot chargeback because he's not satisfied with your site or merchandise.
number one, visa/mc wouldn't allow it.
number two, it's rare that a customer calls visa up and says "assfuck.com really didn't get my rocks off, i'd like to charge it back". they usually say "what is this ibillcs.com charge on my bill? i never went to that site".
number three, visa/mc cannot set a limit on the amount of chargebacks. a consumer has the legal right to dispute purchases. if you feel so strongly for the bullshit you're spewing, feel free to lobby and change consumer protection laws.

psyko514


I love ya', Man.

We actually win several chargebacks per month on the merchant account used for my personal adult sites. We provide serveral pieces of info including IP trace, signup form copy, site terms, etc...

Mitch

Does the cost incurred in fighting it outweigh the admin fee for absorbing it?

If not, you don't even want to think about it.

We respond to every single one. Doesn't everyone? And some of them we are succesful at disputing.

-joe

I got a few chargebacks through Paypal
now and then.
I dont know if they are frauds or other
types...
Ive accepted them as other said,
a fact of life
But now I started to fight....

Exactly.

Now VIP-ID used to fight chargebacks, and they won every one of them.
They would file a lawsuit, subpeona the IP logs from the customers ISP, the works.
It was profitable for them because they sued for the cost of the chargeback + $3000 for "damaging their reputation".

You can only do this if you're processing through your own merchant account though. If you're processing through an IPSP then the charges went through their merchant account and its their reputation at stake, not yours.

Probono,

Persistence is certainly one thing that´s needed. We contact the customers themselves and get signed authorizations for the transactions even after you get the chargeback.
For example, there are cases when a kid will use his parent´s credit card to sign-up and that charge naturally gets chargedback. Ordinarily, you´d think there´s nothing you could do about that, but it is possible to reverse it. After we get the parent on the phone and reason with them, we can often get
them to drop the dispute.
I´d be glad to talk to you more about this. Send me an ICQ at 286108128 or give me a call at 888-SITE-HELP.

Thanks,

Victoria

Thats what sucks about third party processors, you dont have the info to go to war. I was told by my 3rd party there is nothing you can do accept it.

Your service seems very interesting indeed...

they are not suppose to chargeback for those reasons HOWEVER, they can and have! it's called misrepresentation and what they do is state that the service they have received is misreprested by the owner of the site (mainstream or adult...it doesnt matter). do you really think visa & mc is going to investigate every mispresentation claim that comes across their desk? no, they take it at face value. if the customer cant get the cb that way, then they will proceed with fraudulant usage of a credit card. i know this all too well and you know what the issuing bank and merchant services tells you? you are screwed.

thankfully i had a rep at amex (at the time) who told me that i, as a company, had all right to go after the customer for theft of service. i had sent out a fed ex package, the customer signed for the pacakge and amex told me i didnt have a leg to stand on with them. however i did have a leg to stand on if i chose to pursue this myself. as long as i had the customers info, i could go after them legally and that is what i did.

the same holds true to membership sites. if you have that persons full info (which most dont but if you do), you can go after them for ANY fee you want. what you will get is the membership fee AND the chargeback fee cause noone wants to go to court over a porn site membership.

i learned long ago that these people are the bottom of all feeders and that being nice in most (not all) instances is not worth the effort. i had this point validated by my rep over at cardservices. she is the senior vp in ra and she said, tell them the way it is, what you are going to do, and stay firm and they will come around 7 out of 10 times.

it's not even about the money, it's about principle. if you join, you pay and if you try to get out of it, hell have no fury like an honest webmaster stolen from!

Tell me something, Cassie. Do you even read my posts??