[SpicyLemonZest]

The author thinks it matters what Stripe said, since they chose to use it as the title for their blog post. To the extent that it was just meant to be a lament that it's hard to be a small online merchant in an era of strong consumer protections, sure, I sympathize. But they seem to think it's a problem with Stripe that could be fixed if Stripe behaved better.

[gingerlime]

Author here. What makes you think Stripe cannot do better here?

[akerl_]

Stripe has a customer's bank saying "the customer says they didn't make this payment" and you saying "the customer told me they did make this purchase and got the item and they're making fun of me".

They have no way to know if your evidence is real, any more than the bank has a way to know if their customer's evidence is real. Either one (or both) of you could be full of shit.

In that world, what would you like Stripe to do better?

[gingerlime]

What do they feed into their Radar machine learning system? surely there are lots of signals to use here. I'm not saying take only my word and ban this customer forever.

But they have my record as a merchant (successful charges, chargebacks, disputes etc), they have the payer record as a consumer (payments, chargebacks etc), when a merchant submits a dispute, they provide evidence. I provided evidence from DHL that the product was delivered.

No single piece of data is enough on its own, but Stripe is in a perfect position to use all those pieces to be able to better detect fraud.

Yet they explicitly do not use this data at all.

[mrguyorama]

According to payment networks, that chargeback was entirely legitimate

That's why it doesn't get fed into any fraud prevention system. Legitimate chargebacks shouldn't be used to prevent transactions.

You are mad that what you claim to be a flagrantly fraudulent chargeback was approved. Who approved that chargeback, because that's where your actual anger should lie. Ban that bank/provider or whatever and move on with your life.

There's no fraud prevention in this. Payment networks purposely side with the customer here, it's a large part of their business. People use credit cards in part because of the safety and security they provide. They aren't going to suddenly abandon that system because you got scammed out of $30. They won't even do it for companies that get scammed out of millions of dollars a year. Ask me how I know.

If you don't like this system, you are free to stop accepting credit cards, and lose all that business. Most merchants are happy to lose money here and there to facilitate their business.

You insist that stripe's antifraud system should be treating this as fraud, but the process that decides what is fraud or not has decided it is not fraud. This should not be automated in any way. No system tries to automate this "problem customer prevention" because it's a million times harder of a problem than just fraud prevention, likely to ban just as many good customers as bad (because of the probabilistic nature of fraud prevention), and not even remotely worth it. Plenty of companies don't even try to fight it, because then at least you save the $20 chargeback fee.

If you have a problem customer who is more trouble than they are worth, YOU ban them. This customer might have never scammed any other merchant, and those merchants don't want to lose good business because you are nettled over getting scammed.

[gingerlime]

Yeah I totally get what you’re saying. It’s true. Still find it frustrating as a tiny merchant because it’s just too easy to get scammed and the system seems skewed against you.

> Plenty of companies don't even try to fight it, because then at least you save the $20 chargeback fee.

That’s sad in my opinion. It shouldn’t be the norm. Stripe support encouraged me to file a dispute and submit evidence but next time I prob won’t bother.

I personally find it disappointing that Stripe is in a position to do something about it but prefers the status quo that clearly allows such fraud to continue.

[akerl_]

Based on the quote you provided, the CSR was very specific that what they don't use is merchant-provided evidence. They didn't say they don't leverage information about chargebacks or other disputes.

[gingerlime]

and that’s my complaint on the blog post. They should use these data points too.