Chargebacks 11 days after issuing refund - anybody seen this happen?
 

About 16 days ago I noticed an affiliate appeared to be carding my program.

I banned him and tried to issue refunds to all his members. There were over 20.

I quickly hit the limit of refunds I was allowed to issue at that time and contacted the billing company's live support. - Who asked me to create a ticket.

After my ticket was ignored for 3 days I decided to try issuing refunds again, this time I was more scientific and prioritized the ones that looked "most fraudulent" and was able to more or less take care of the situation.

Today however, two of the refunds I issued came back as charge-backs, 11 full days after the refunds were issued.

My ticket is STILL being ignored.

How is that even possible? Is this something that happens a lot?

Sounds like the bank beat you guys to the punch.

If it had been one or two days later I would understand, but 11 days seems like plenty of time for a chargeback that is already issued to hit.

I wonder if the biller just sat on the refund and tried to keep the money.

I wonder what is the point of refunding charges that appear fraudulent if I am gonna get hit with a chargeback anyway. ( and lose the money TWICE plus fees)

I don't know, which is why I am not naming the biller. I just wonder what others have experienced.

It's possible that it's a scam. Get a double-refund into the card, withdraw the fraudulent cash out of an ATM, the merchant (you) is now liable for chargeback & refund.

The CC company won't give those funds back if they don't have access to them, they just pass the buck.

I would consider that except I know for a fact that the sales were fraudulent,

1) Known proxies
2) IP's thousands of miles from billing zip code
3) fake emails

That's why I refunded them in the first place.

I understand a savvy consumer could make sales himself under these conditions if he was planning this kind of action, but several consumers under the same aff code?

This is textbook affiliate fraud if there ever was such a thing.

Who is this biller who ignores your tickets?

While I can't say that I've seen this exact issue. I have seen some crazy stats show up due to fraud/refunds/cb's, I'm sure many others have as well.

Support wise... most of the normal support people don't really know shit and the chain of commands seems to fail, often, when higher support requests come in. I would suggest contacting someone else, depending on the biller you could contact the fraud department directly, or ask around for the lead techs email, and sometimes the manager of support can help and if all else fails, call them.

Anyone who has a problem with fraud should look into minFraud http://www.maxmind.com/app/ccv_overview - it's owned by Maxmind.

We use it in our mainstream site, and have almost eliminated fraud. Basically what they do is create a score based on a lot of factors. You don't send any credit card information if you don't want, a optional value is the BIN number on the CC, but not the entire CC. They check for known open proxies, distance between IP, and billing address and things like that.

We love it, and it's really cheap.

Merchant or third party processor?

I'm wondering if some of the credits looked like they went through on your system but didn't on the processor side. I've seen it happen before and you think you've credited them but then all come back later and CB.

And if a biller ever ignored me for so long when you pay them a pretty processing fee; I'd find a new one.

Good point Kristen, I'm still not willing to name them as I am giving them time to process my second ticket.

It is a 3rd party processor and of course I will be dropping them to a nice low spot on my cascades if I am not satisfied with the outcome.

Thanks Alky for your tip about he Maxmind product, I will be following up with them shortly.

Sounds like you should switch billing companies.

I don't know if getting your own merch acct is out of the question, but this is a perfect example of why I use Netbilling.

Never a problem like this, ever.

Yes, I have had it happen also. Three times actually.

Basically, if you don't catch a bad card while the transaction is still voidable (normally about 8 hours) then there is always a risk this will happen.

you right
i love maxmind too
:)

jeez that carder has balls using public proxies.

Not public, the biller already has filtering in place to prevent that, but there are other ways to discover proxies.

If this was a smaller biller this could have been your problem in the first place.

Why use them in the cascade if they aren't filtering this for you?

I highly doubt either CCBILL or EPOCH would have let things get this far. Or let your ticket sit in the oven until its all burnt and crispy.

Had that happened once with Segpay.
I think we got 30 dollar fee for CB as well. So it cost us 60+ bucks for that "join"