Originally Posted by VGeorgie

I thought at least some of the issues were resolved in that thread. Here are my experiences on the matter, and what I've learned.

(I'll jump to a summary now: CCBill has never cheated me, but their system is imperfect, has bugs, and "features" I may not care for. These are different complaints than outright fraud.)

1. The OP confused reservation numbers in the logs with subscription numbers. Apparently that caused confusion and made a CCBill rep think a username from another site's join had been added to his site. OP admitted to the misunderstanding, so this part of the mystery is a non-issue.

2. CCBill mentioned a few times about usernames being reserved in the htpasswd file upon unsuccessful (declined) signup. In my experience, the reserved username can stay there for a while (could be minutes to hours). It is eventually removed. The OP and CCBill came to a conclusion regarding this, too.

3. The process of reserved usernames is apparent if you have STORED usernames, as I do. Because my users are given a username from a prepared list, and the list is alphabetical, I can match up any and all usernames applied by CCBill with my master list. Though this very thing once perplexed me, now that I know what's going on it makes sense. I can also see that at no time has CCBill ever given someone a pass to my site without my being credited for it.

4. CCBill's system is NOT always good at removed expired usernames. Not sure they ever claim to be 100% accurate here, and there are many uncontrollable variables here anyway. Every once in a while it's a good idea to make a compare list of your htpasswd file and the active members list from CCBill. You can then manually go through and remove the expired usernames that are still there.

I do this every month or so, and usually there's one or two stragglers. On a few occasions they've realized this and have continued to access my site. For free of course.

5. I use Strongbox so I can see who logs in. On a few occasions I'd see logins for a username that I did not receive an e-mail confirmation for. The username was from my list, so I knew CCBill generated it.

What this turned out to be: CCBill allows expired members to rejoin for a particular amount of time after the expiration of a subscription. In my case, I have lower cost for subsequent months, so some customers take advantage of this. Costs less than rejoining all over again. When they do, they're given a *new* username from the list, but no new subscription e-mail is generated.

These usernames are "ghosts" and they appear connected to the wrong subscriptions. But there's no fraud going on here, just bad software design. CCBill's admin does not keep a history of usernames given out to a single subscription. Change a customer's username, and the old username can no longer be looked up. This makes trying to confirm signups with e-mail subscriptions very difficult.

I'll repeat: my system of STORED usernames, Strongbox, and manual compares have never shown CCBill to be cheating. At times there system may not be 100% reliable, though, so it's a good idea to do some manual maintenance every once in a while.