How to stop fraudulent chargebacks on online stores
Unscrupulous buyers are claiming they never authorized purchases or executing triangulation scams, leaving store owners terrified that every new order is fake. This constant threat of fraudulent chargebacks puts merchant income at risk and forces some sellers to abandon entire sales platforms just to survive.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Using third-party fraud protection and chargeback management tools like Signifyd, NoFraud, Kount, and Chargeflow
- 2Manually checking for red flags such as different billing/shipping addresses, rush shipping, or mismatched names
- 3Implementing address verification and fraud filters on payment gateways
- 4Using custom billing descriptor statements with randomized verification numbers
- 5Setting up automated workflows in platform tools to screen risk levels
- 6Buying back your own products from the scammer's listings to trap them and refuse fulfillment when they order with a stolen card
- 7Filing VERO (Verified Rights Owner) takedowns with eBay
- 8Stopping sales on eBay completely
- 9Using DMCA tools to protect images and mark them
- 10Setting up Google alerts to track when products get listed elsewhere
- 11Spending hours collecting evidence and screenshots to fight the dispute with banks
- 12Sending unpaid customers to collections agencies to recover lost funds
- 13Filing online criminal complaints through the IC3 FBI portal for theft and fraud
- 14Filing local police reports against fraudulent buyers
- 15Gathering extensive evidence like police reports and letters from shipping carriers to win the chargeback dispute
- 16Filing IC3 reports for internet crimes
- 17Switching payment processors or using third-party gateways like authorize.net through a bank
- 18Integrating alternative checkout options like PayPal
- 19writing down patterns from each fraud order
- 20holding orders that trigger multiple risk factors for a manual look
- 21adding paid fraud screening tools
- 22keeping a personal spreadsheet to track postcodes and scam attempts
- 23Considering quitting selling digital content online due to account security risks
- 24Refunding the customer in full to avoid a chargeback
- 25Manually googling shipping addresses to verify if they exist
- 26Manually capturing payments to review order details
- 27Using signature on delivery for high-value orders
- 28Enabling 3DS on checkout
In their words
Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Random chargebacks.”source ↗
“People saying never ordered this. Didn’t authorize.”source ↗
“Now every new order I’m half excited, half terrified it’s another fake one. Feels like I’m playing roulette with my own income.”source ↗
“And yet… almost every week, a customer opens a chargeback. Not because something is wrong. Not because they reached out and we ignored them. But because it’s easier to hit “dispute” on their bank app than to send an email or return the product.”source ↗
“Lately I’ve fallen victim to a triangulation scam.”source ↗
“I noticed an uptick of chargebacks so I searched my product (I sell a common product that is combined with a couple of things, making it somewhat unique) I found 7 listings from 3 different eBay accounts.”source ↗
“$2700 Chargeback Opened 450 Days Later for a second time!!! Shopify doesn’t care!!!”source ↗
“Shopify agrees but say I need to treat it like a new chargeback and even through its duplicative will not close it!”source ↗
“I've dealt with chargebacks on Shopify in only 1.5 months of being in business, already had 3 high volume chargebacks of people blatantly stealing the product.”source ↗
“my friend runs a small online shop and she's been getting hit with these chargebacks too”source ↗
“My Shopify is low-volume but high-value and I’ve had some painful fraudulent chargebacks in the past.”source ↗
“A customer recently did a chargeback on an order he placed. He claimed the product arrived damaged which is really weird because he hadn’t received the item yet.”source ↗
“We stopped selling on eBay completely due to this issue and this dramatically reduced our issue.”source ↗
“I get this a lot. They don’t use their real name. They use a fake one. I’ve contacted eBay about this about 5 times. No response.”source ↗
“One person ordered a couple items, we reached out to both them and the HR manager because one of the items was discontinued, the customer issued a chargeback AFTER telling us what they wanted to swap it for, and then emailed us a week after they won the chargeback asking where the items were.”source ↗
“Most of them are "item not received" where tracking clearly shows delivery, and we lose the dispute anyway more often than not.”source ↗
“This is the exact experience I had with Shopify several times before we finally dropped them and setup our own cart.”source ↗
“I just got another chargeback for a fraudulent order we shipped a few weeks ago.”source ↗
“there's no open list worth trusting, the ones that actually work sit inside the paid screening services and none of them let you query the network directly.”source ↗
“I've personally seen the most drastic increase in fraud attempts this summer, in over 14 years of selling!”source ↗
“Is this a classic sign of credit card fraud? Between ebay and shopify I have 975 sales and never had a chargeback so I've never dealt with this before.”source ↗
“I'd like to fight it because it sucks becoming a secondary victim of credit card fraud. But it's also not worth losing my shop over $6 in shipping or getting payments held for 4 months over it.”source ↗
“I guess I'm just looking for the best advice on how to avoid fraudulent orders.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 2Can merchants send you to collections after a chargeback?
- 6How do I dispute a bunch of incorrect charges at once?
- 2Merchant says refund went to a closed card but bank has no record
- 2How do I get my money back from an online coach scam?
- 4Why is QuickBooks still taking credit card fees from my bank account?
- 2What to do when an online seller stops responding after purchase