CCBill so afraid of charbacks - catering to con artists
 

CCBill how dare you refund someone with 1 week left on a 3 month membership? This is NOT the first time you have pulled shit like this ... are you are so afraid of a chargeback that you would rather let a con artist rip off your clients? This guy was a member for 2 1/2 months, used 80% of the total bandwidth and violated his term of agreement so you give him free porn as a reward... Whoo Hoo, I bet he just LOVES you guys!! I see how valuable this $750 and $350 will be. We pay you, you make money and then you fuck us up the ass. Excuse me while I unzip my pants and bend over for your easier access.

Explain to me, what the fuck are you doing?

did you email or call them about it?

On top of that I will bet anything the con artist surfer wasnt banned. I wouldnt care about refunds if they would just ban the bastards... Atleast ban them from the site they wanted the refund from !!!!

Yes I just spoke to them. They said that they didnt want the chargeback. I reminded that that he had a full 2 1/2 month access and used 80% of the bandwidth and they said it was authorized by their senior supervisor.

Dammit

I'll fuck you up the ass for free....

"On top of that I will bet anything the con artist surfer wasnt banned. I wouldnt care about refunds if they would just ban the bastards... Atleast ban them from the site they wanted the refund from !!!!"

EXACTLY!! I said to CCBill that this SHOULD go on the guys record but their concern was "saving the chargeback".

That´s very fucked up:mad: They should pressure the customers who want a refund much more, show him the BW stats and say "Sir, it sure looks like you enjoyed first 2 months LOL"

Third party processors are becoming irrelevant and they are starting to get scared.

fucking 3 STOOGES (IBILL, CCBILL and PAYPAL) !!!

they are big theifs these days! :feels-hot

No disrespect..

But welcome to the real fucking world.

CCBill did what any other company would do. What you don't seem to understand is if the refund isn't issued the customer will chargeback. Neither you OR CCBill has any rights in the situation since the customer never signed a receipt.

There is no other option but to refund when a customer insists. Doesn't matter that it's not "right" or "fair" or that the customer is a thief. I managed my own merchant account for porn site sales and this is the way it is.

Brad

Oh yeah....

What is this "afraid of the chargeback" routine? Don't you realize that only 1 in 100 transactions is allowed to be charged back in order to maintain a merchant account?

Also, did you ever consider that regardless of the fact you now didn't get paid on that... That CCBill paid fees both times, processing the initial transaction AND refunding it? Have you thought about the fact that they provide toll free 24 customer assistance and what that must cost to provide? Have you considered the fact that OF COURSE they train their staff to be as savvy as possible so that money doesn't have to be refunded?

You might not have gotten paid but CCBill lost money on that. There's a big difference. Besides which, you're selling VAPOR and there is virtually no cost of goods. You should be thankful for the revenue you do have.

that's why they are getting 15% of the transactions

hmm.

That's complete bullshit!
If ccbill is this scared/stupid to refund the money of this asshole then it's their problem and they should not take the money from you!
You pay $750 plus 15% so if they wanna refund they can do it out of their own pocket.

It's the same as buying a car.... driving it for a year..... take all good parts of it and return it and claim all your money back.

what's wrong with that? i'm doing it all the time

I dont mind the refunds as long as the surfer is then blocked from my site. What gets me pissed is when you look up the refunded surfers and see that they have had numerous refunds.

About 8 months ago my password file got corrupted. One of my long time customers called ccbill to tell them there was a problem. They asked him if he wanted a refund. He said "No, I just wanted to alert the site owner that there is a problem". CCbill said ok but if he felt a refund was necessary he could always mail [email protected]. So, the customer says ok and hangs up the phone. A few hours go by and the customer calls again and gets the same run around and more offers for a refund. Once again he says he just wants to make sure the site owner is alerted. By the time the ordeal is over the guy is offered a refund 6 times and I never get a call or e-mail about the password problems from ccbill. This guy in ccbill support knew three words.. " yes , sir , and refund".

Keep in mind.. ccbill is better than Ibill. If that same customer would have mailed Ibill he would have been refunded with no discussion or anything. The customer would have gotten an e-mail saying "your charges were refunded, - support@ibill"

The people who ask for refunds and the people who come back for trials every month are the first ones to chargeback if they actually see a full months charge on their statement. People asking for refunds need to be scrubbed and trials need to be limited to one per site. I have seen it so many times... the guy buys 15 trial memberships then the first time he forgets to cancel he charges me back. Its not that he doesnt like the site. If he didnt like the site he wouldnt keep coming back. He is simply a cheap bastard and I have no tools to limit him.

That's true however they could at least block his card from future use.

Same problem with iBill, and any other billing company I think. They refund on the spot, but never bother to blacklist.

maybe i'm just a unique case, but everytime this happens - ibill tells the member to contact us at our cust serv email address, and cc's the initial email to us.

*shrug*

Quiet
I used Ibill for one year and never got an e-mail from their support regarding a customer. Last November 2001 I dropped Ibill.. their operating procedures could have changed by now.

Are you sure they forward to you 100% of the refund claims?

of course not. but i assume it's most, because we get them regularly, from different ibill employees.

i have no complaints as far as refunds go.

I think blocking customers that asked refunds from further transactions is no more than logical - it saves the webmaster money, it saves the billing company money, and it most likely will lower the chargeback ratio in the future.
So why hasn't this been done yet?

I would say if you have problems with the same person signing up every month for a "trial" to download your new stuff, limit your trial area. Put just enough to tantalize the person, don't give them full access, don't give them access to the new stuff (keep the trial area the same).

Do they forward to you phone refund claims also?

bah. i'm done with this thread.

Punkworld, I think banning customers is the wrong way, someone asking for a refund won't necessarily do this again and again...there are loads of rip-off sites that promise alot and only have "paysite plugins" in their members area. I don't want to adress anyone personally, just a general impression of many sites.

The problem is homemade, it's true that there are alot of people who know that they don't have to face consequences for a chargeback and signup with the intention not to pay, but I'm strongly convinced that offering more quality and more value for money would help reducing this problem, too.

Btw, from the numbers I have the # of rejected transactions is already by far outnumbering the # of successful transactions, but most billing companies won't show you those stats..."burning" customers by banning them maybe an easy solution, but I doubt it's the only one.

Sure. But they do call to claim unauthorized usage or tell that was their underaged kid who subscribed.
Not that I wanted to handle that kind of shit anyway :glugglug

And I agree refunds are not the biggest issue with 3rd party processing. But still I'd like to have more control over my refunds, and have the option to blacklist most abusive customers who claim refunds too often.

Unfortunately not always true, at least with iBill it isn't - they go too far the other way if anything. I cancelled a membership to a site not too long ago and despite that got rebilled. Contacted iBill and the site and it was looked into and confirmed 100% that the probelm was with the site and not myself. Even got a copy of internal memo's sent to me saying it was being looked at further as the site's cancellation system was pure BS and breaking iBill's TOS so being inverstigated. They apologised. I got the money back.

However, seems I now can't subscribe to any service using iBill. As I very rarely need to use them it's no great loss to me - if a site does use iBill for a service I want I just go elsewhere. Seems though that they can't get the balance right. They'll happily BL people when there's been a genuine fuckup but there's also people floating around who are allowed to rip sites off on a regular basis. Common sense and/or intelligence seem to be in short supply with many of the billing companies.

Honey, is this your first week in this business?
How about you run out and get your own merch account and then you just take the chargeback instead of the credit.

Guess what? after the november deadline, CCbill won't be protecting themselves, they'll be protecting you!

The idiocy in this business never fails to top itself.

oh, and markusbooger, go back to your bestiality board and sites.
No one is interested in your dog loving opinions when it comes to billing companies.

just stop giving three month membership option

Web girl

If you email me the sub id of the transaction, I can look into it for you

[email protected]

However, to let you know, and I do know firsthand how the process works...

Our CSRs are empowered with tools that give them the ability to view many details about a transaction when they are answering emails or on the phone with a customer. Based on the information they have, they make a decision. They are also constantly monitored to ensure that they are following our guidelines and are making good decisions.

The customer might have claimed fraud, that he did not authorize the charge. That he just saw it on his statement, didn?t know what it was, and called CCBill. He might have said that he doesn?t even own a computer, I don?t know.

We don?t like refunds, but we obviously like chargebacks far less. This is the business that we are in. If customers had to mail or fax in a signed website membership purchase order, it would be one thing. We would be able to better dispute chargebacks that way and have it on file if the customer asks for a refund. But that isn?t the case. Ultimately, the tools available to help assure that the cardholder authorized the purchase are limited.

Sure, we have the IP address in the area, a name and AVS match, etc. But how can you prove that the cardholder had actually authorized the transaction? ...although I do have to give credit to CVV2, which is great in resolving some disputes.

What Brad said was right?in fact, CCBill goes one step further and does not charge you its processing fee on refunded transactions. What we base our fee off of is:

Gross Sales minus Refunds/Returns = amount that we base our fee off of

If you had $100 in sales and $100 in refunds in a pay period, however unlikely that is, although it cost us processing fees to pull the funds from the customers account and to put those funds back in, plus all of the other costs associated with processing, your CCBill fee for that period is $0.00

When we refund a customer, we are essentially crediting you our fee on a sale for the same amount.

Based on our fee structure, it is not in our best interest to issue refunds all of the time. We don't want to issue refunds any more than you want to get them. But chargebacks are worse, instead of having to reverse/credit a percentage of your revenue back, you can lose your business

As far as being able to ?ban? a customer from the CCBill system, that is an option that we do have. But again, it is a judgment call. We do regularly lock customers out from CCBill.

The last thing I want to do is to come off sounding pompous, but I wanted to let you know our side of it as well.

Perfect world = 0 chargebacks, 0 refunds

I guess I have been pretty lucky...CCBill has never refunded on me *knock on wood*

iBill was HORRIBLE about it! They all but answered the telephone, "Thank you for calling iBill, how much may I refund?":1orglaugh

Refunds are part of taking credit cards. Like 12Clicks said go get your own merchant account.

I am hoping that this new fee will wipe out whiny bitches like this.

BTW, 3 month memberships have huge CB rates and most programs do not even offer them anymore.

But your webmasters have NO tools..

I can only block a person during the refund process. If a ccbill CSR refunds a user and does not select "block user" , the user cannot be blocked later on by myself.

If a person asks for a refund on my site he should atleast be blocked from my site. Thats common sense ..


Webmaster tools Id like to have.
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Id like to be able to select which countries I accept signups from.

I want to be able to block users.

I want to be able to change a persons user/pass w/out it screwing up the membership. Sometimes good members do get their passwords stolen.

Id like to be able to select certain reports and have them mailed to me daily. This is common sense. Right now I get hundreds of e-mails everyday from ccbill about signups and so forth. How about just one summary e-mail ? It saves you bandwidth and me time.

That's why they take 15%. To provide customer service, etc. It's not like they're doing this out of the goodness of their heart and we should be thankful they allow us to have revenue and that they provide some services.

Also, porn is far from a zero cost of goods business. Just because you can't hold the product in your hand, doesn't mean it costs nothing to produce.

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What is this "afraid of the chargeback" routine? Don't you realize that only 1 in 100 transactions is allowed to be charged back in order to maintain a merchant account?
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I always thought the chargeback percentage was based on dollars, not actual signups.

Does anyone know which is the way they determine a site's chargeback ratio?

Brutal

I agree! I would like to see someone call their billing company and say something like,"You know, I really did not like that steak I ate at Ruth's Chris last night, I would like to charge that back, please."

A chargeback for $34.95 is no worse than a $1.99 chargeback.
Each counts as one chargeback and you must have under 1/100

Really? isn´t that possiple with ccbill? We use Jettis and in their admin it´s easy to change a password on a recurring member. i just find it odd that such a simple feature isn´t available with ccbill..

mmm.. Ruth Chris' Steak.
The Potatoes au Gratin are amazing too.

Nope, because you have to assign a date when you change it.
Corvett will argue and say I could set it to a year. The problem is many of my members rebill long past a year. When that user's pass fails to work, he is gonna mail me. Im gonna have to figure out what happened. Im gonna have to mail the user back and explain. Now the user is gonna be pissed cause he has to join again which means he gets hit with the trial fee on top of the monthly fee when he rejoins. It's alot of crap to contend with and it's a common sense thing. I should be able to change or re-add a user with ZERO side affects.

Mark, this is NOT a case of fraud, this is a flat out con game made by a 58 year old man who has been around the block several times and knows how to play your system.

It completely baffles me how a, "senior supervisor" could decide to save a chargeback long after services have been rendered!! All he had to do was #1 look at the date of purchase against the date when the man called for the refund and #2 check his past purchase history which he does have!! HOW DID 2 1/2 MONTHS GO UNNOTICED?? I certainly noticed that he logged in on an average of 6 to 8 times a day, is responsible for using 80% of my bandwidth and attended 100% of my live cam shows so obviously he was quite pleased with the site content..... and you turn around and reinforce that it's ok to scam us, and there are no consequences to being an asshole!!

I must be living in a perfect world because in the 3 years that my site has been up and running I have never had a single chargeback. I have had a similar situation, however, when someone with a 30 day membership called on the 28th day and told you that he didnt have the money, so what did you do? You gave him a refund and said the same thing, "he threatened us with a chargeback"!! Big deal, let it go on his record. I don't HAVE to be %100 chargeback free for 3 years, and its OK to have a 1% chargeback rate!! Do you think that restaraunts, gift stores and any other business that offers a service is 100% chargeback free?

Do you think Victoria Secret will let me chargeback on the panties that I wore for my cam shows? I wonder if the toy store will issue me credit on my used dildos?

Tell me, what have you been doing exactly with all of my processing fees? I thought those fees were there to cover crap like this!

Geeze!!

You cannot eat half of a pizza, or more, and then demand your money back. Things just don't work that way in the real world.

Visa needs to get their heads out of their asses in a big way. Refunding money to theiving surfers out of fear of visa and their silly little percentages? They can go suck a nut.

I spoke to someone in the tech support department on the morning of 10/19/02 who stated that Mr. Cohen claimed to have been banned from my site, which was not the case. Mr. Cohen was NOT banned from my site, my password sentry (security script) temporarily suspended his password for having 3 different IP resolutions.

Mr. Cohen has 3 different computers with 3 different types of connections. He logs into Peep Shows via my website and gets banned from Peep Shows for mistreating the camgirls. As Mr. Cohen himself explained it, in order to get back in to Peep Shows he has to re-enter with a different connection. Mr. Cohen and I have discussed this in the past because this is not the first time my security system has temporarily suspended his password. He understands that my security system only allows 2 IP resolutions, 1 from home and 1 from work. He made it clear that he would not continue this behavior because we had also discussed that the url he uses to enter Peep Shows is linked to misschianti.com and that any future instances would be considered a violation of my sites terms of use agreement. I suspect that Mr. Cohen called CCBill for a refund when my system was triggered after he again was "playing" at Peep Shows" 10/13/02, which is 2 and 1/2 months into his 3 month membership... hardly the time or an acceptable reason to be issuing a refund.

For the 2 and 1/2 months that Mr. Cohen logged in to my site prior to my secuirty device temporarily blocking his password was used on an average of 6 to 8 times a day, is responsible for using 80% of my bandwidth and shows attendance at 100% of my live cam shows, as well as the cam shows within my free cam exchange, and the free upsell cam and chats. He obviously was quite pleased with the site content as shown below by his last full weeks usage which averages equally with his 2 and 1/2 month usages.

10/1/02 SPQR50 34,103,354 bytes
10/2/02 SPQR50 68,946,425 bytes
10/3/02 SPQR50 192,047,804 bytes
10/4/02 SPQR50 82,746,475 bytes
10/5/02 SPQR50 155,152,783 bytes
10/6/02 SPQR50 29,109,356 bytes
10/7/02 SPQR50 43,941,250 bytes

This is NOT someone who did not make use of his membership and should NOT be refunded. This is a con game that he is playing because he was afraid I would ban him for misuse of my site!

I am protesting the allowance of this refund and am demanding that my account is credited in full.

Why dont you go into your admin and find his address etc then call information to get his home number. If a women answers.. he is fucked ;-) You seem like the type to have the courage ..

lmao, Oh thats funny!

Send him a bill, in the regular mail, and threaten to report him to the credit bureaus. Or something like that?

... was that your only member ?

It doesnt matter if a site has 1 member or 1 million members. CCBill should not be issuing refunds after the fact. Plain and simple.