FIDDY chargebacking motherfuckers!

Yeah I caught that after looking into it more. With my own merch it would definitely make sense but with CCBill it's a waste of time.

LOL
African-American-listed?

I don't like doing business with 3rd party payment processors because their fees are a lot more than what is available in the open market to us. When you process large volumes of transactions you can negotiate better terms.

The customer credit card BIN numbers are submitted directly into our PCI-DSS servers. I know who they are and how they came by VPN, Proxy or their public IP -- we scrub our own transactions dynamically in real time now. I get my responses relayed directly from the processor's banks -- not some line of shit that I can't verify days later. My algorithm when adhered to is working for us. I don't get sorry ass reasons for chargebacks -- nor do I accept them.

If you have ever made a chargeback (demanded a refund) on your debit card or credit card with your issuing bank you would know what is involved. If a 3rd party billing processors are willing to reverse charge transactions on a customer's complaint to protect their aggregated merchant accounts -- that is not my problem.

I have been noticing a lot of chargeback activity on prepaid cards lately. (this year) I used to allow them because even though they rarely rebill they also rarely charge back, so they improve your ratios - not so much anymore.

I have been blocking cloud hosting IP's VPN's and proxies for years but lately I use maxmind minifraud to check proxy score, no known proxies get through and a number of IP's I wouldn't previously have suspected are also blocked.

Nothing stops customers from being complete assholes and charging back "because they can" though.

Trust me -- do not rely only on mini fraud -- it is reactive not heuristic. We have used it for years and still do -- but only as a ''cog in the wheel.''

Oh wow....:Oh crap

Barry,

You sound like you have really got a grasp on this stuff which is refreshing.. You mention 3ds however i have found it to be a nightmare w/ most customers bailing at the friction point of not understanding it or getting a pw wrong.. How do you deal with this?

With your hard scrub which is really good from the advertiser/merchant side, how do you balance the conversion drop on the affiliate side when there seems to be alot of competition w/in the webcam vertical?

Would love to hear more of your input as you sound like you truly know what you are talking about.

Also if anyone has insight...

Fraud Alerts.... one of the major things i have been trying to reduce chargeback wise is when billing a US customer in a different region is that it initiates a fraud alert to the credit card holder after the approved transaction and they contact the customer w/ a fraud alert.

then the customers claim they never bought anything in XYZ region and the chargeback process begins almost immediately with cancelled card, etc.

How do you guys handle minimizing this?

Unfortunately it only works for 3rd party billers that are connected to certain databases. Furthermore it works for all of our websites (several thousands).

What happens to the good buyer who charged back because he didn't see the cross sale box and was pissed he was getting two monthly charges instead of one? ... maybe even 3 monthly charges.

It is a trade off ...

Our customers seem to be adapting and we do lose some because of the 3ds issues -- but those customers that refuse to verify? A large number of them -- when they are new customers are your chargebacks waiting to happen -- the friendly frauds (kids with their stolen credit cards belonging to their parents?) get caught -- they cannot authenticate their parent's card -- BOOM! they are stopped cold.


I let other cam sites have the questionable customers and share the chargeback risk with their models and affiliates... LOL. Models that get ripped off are a bigger problem than affiliates really. Affiliates are not asked to jam a dildo in their ass and moan for 20 minutes and never see the money they were promised.

Many old/existing customers like to use VPN accounts for adult websites. They have privacy issues for a lot of reasons. I have a rule -- if you are anyone using a VPN the first time you must 3ds verify -- no exceptions. Come back with your public IP and we will cut you some slack. If a customer asks about the high barrier of 3ds I instruct our customer service people to explain that the 3ds verification is for the customer's own protection -- he verifies with his bank that he is using his own card by verifying the password -- no one is committing Internet credit card fraud with his credit card and ruining his credit standing.

Some merchants ask me to 3ds my credit cards -- I comply -- it is a legitimate charge I am making. The real problem is some of the jack-ass banks that do not support 3ds -- we have workarounds that are fair but restrictive. Interesting to note: Many customers will submit 2 or 3 cards that are in the same name until one of their cards issuing bank's participates in 3ds and maintains a verification server -- VISA and MC need to compel 3ds compliance IMHO -- verification online is in their interest too -- at a minimum the banks need to write off a lot of costs contesting fraud, absorbing losses and the expense of issuing new credit cards in the event of a real chargeback -- the bank immediately closes your card account and issues a new card in a new account number.

Most "chargebacks" reported to adult merchants are processor reversals not hard chargebacks from a bank.

The reversal may be from the bank for reasons other than a customer's complaint -- a stolen card, a decline because the customer's credit limit is exceeded, a content decline (adult website) or other non customer contested issue. If the bank feels that your card has been compromised for any reason *including the unauthorized use by a family member* the bank takes your card and shreds it, closed that card account, and you wait for the new card to come in the mail, meantime;
you have problems with any reoccurring payments legitimately scheduled on that card *all your internet subscriptions will not post and charge*
I know this personally. With a number of banks -- I have been victim of both POS terminal (swiped) and Internet (to card present) frauds -- none of the frauds were a 3ds transaction that I made(<period>).

Use minifraud from maxmind to check the location of the BIN -- make sure that the person charging the transaction is not on a VPN/Proxy in the same country as the card. This is why the USA has the most fraud (on the surface);

1. the USA has the most stolen cards and
2. the majority of datacenters offering VPN/Proxy services are located in the USA.

They are out to fuck you and if you get fucked -- it is really your fault in most cases.

One thought I want to add on unreported friendly fraud:

I can only speculate how many times there is unauthorized use of a credit card that is settled internally within the family or between friends.

The charge gets paid to the cardholder by the unauthorized person using the card.

Read: the kid pays his mom or dad back and swears he will never do that again. Maybe, his parent threatens to report it to the police or some silly shit (it's a civil tort:0P).

So, you have a one time sales maybe ... More likely, the parent contacts the merchant or the processor's contact toll-free number ... We prefer that the customer contact us we have global toll free service. We may only refund the amount that is exclusive of our ''hard'' loses -- the model share. We and the affiliate eat the rest. Less than $100 is just not worth all the trouble and jeopardizing our long-term business and financial relationships.

How much can a cam customer chargeback? With a paysite it's anywhere between $29.95 and $99.95, or a maximum of five months rebills I think. So the maximum CB loss is not huge. But can a customer rack up 5K in cam charges then CB that high of an amount, for example?

If so then I can understand your security measures. :)

I have one new customer that has spent (transacted) over $4,000 in the past 2 months -- the time span for a chargeback is 0 - 90 days plus the arbitration time making the window about 120 days or 6 months from the first transaction. This is an extreme example -- a relatively rare occurrence.

More normal might be a new customer that has transacted $200 - $600 in the same chargeback window.

Money amounts don't really matter usually -- the accounting is the percentage of transactions that is the factor i.e.; 1/100 transactions = 1%

Gotcha. But if a customer chargebacked $600 I would be 6x times as pissed. LOL But again, paysites are different.

Sounds like you have your CB shit together. VERY impressive! :thumbsup

I started a war on chargebacks 3 months ago. Our staff is fully participating and we are covering each others backs on this issue. We have spent $1000s of dollars in administrative and development time -- the fraud battle never ends. You can only work on fraud prevention -- after the fact you are always butt-hurt -- you lost -- and should learn a lesson from it -- or you will get fucked over again and again.

VISA Net will not be the only alternative in the future -- I think the whole credit card system has a limited future. But for the next 10 years these bankcard associations will be able to dominate online commerce and dictate the rules.

A merchant is not liable for normal consumer or hacker/carder fraud for a 3ds approved transaction -- the issuing bank eats the loss when it occurs -- those are the rules. I am just playin' ball :2 cents:

BTW, regarding surfers and their stupidity.

Do you guys have a lot of bounced/thrown into spam "join" emails? Most surfers use some throwaway account at free email providers like yahoo/hotmail etc, and these cocksuckers send our "join" email straight to the spam folder. Stupid surfers can't see the email with all the join info and the hell starts.

Our servers/IPs are not in spamhaus db, so i dont know why the fuck our mails would get sent into spam.

Any ideas?

Your domain SPF records could be formatted incorrectly.

I switched to Google business email for $5 a month using my domain, never went direct to spam since.

I dont give a shit if a kid joined via moms card. It's their word against mine. And I produce all the evidence - the join IP that matches the customers address, the use of content/members area with the same IP.

Most of these cases are won by us, because they file a CB under "unauthorized transaction". But I prove that it's actually been authorized from the customer's house, and their bank usually doesn't want to take chances with arbitration etc.

Could you please get into more details how that works? What is SPF records and how setting up Google business email helps? Membership related email gets sent from gmail account?

don't do that... guy is as clueless as the remember lmpts

SPF is a text record in your DNS records.
It authorizes your SMTP domains (authorized mail server senders).

https://support.google.com/a/answer/33786?hl=en
https://support.google.com/a/answer/..._topic=2759192

Just get rid of the tubes... if you walked into your local gas station and on your left was a hot girl giving away free snicker bars... would you not take one?

But on your right there was an even hotter girl selling two snicker bars for the price of one.

What would you do? 8 out of 10 of you would take the free shit and run.

So... should I jerk off to a hot alt girl tonight? Yeah let's do that. Ok...

Google search... "brunette alt girl getting fucked hard".
Dear surfer... I found 4378 videos for you to watch. Would you like the video to be 5 minutes long or 47 minutes long???

OR

Google search... "brunette alt girl getting fucked hard".
Dear surfer... I found 4378 SITES that have 45 second trailer videos of "brunette alt girl getting fucked hard".

If it were the latter case... the surfer will find an alt girl he likes... and buy a membership so that he can BLAST a good one to a girl that turns him on. And the site owners would get paid.

Do the math... how many people are jerking off on a tube right now for free? 100k plus I bet! Think if we were getting 100k sales an hour divided up between all of us site owners????

Getting girls, shooting them, paying them, processing the content, running the site. How long will we be able to sustain ourselves? This phenomenon is called "porno warming"... it's going to become unsustainable.

Now to the topic... when I started this in 2002... CCBIll said, we handle everything. Customer service, chargebacks, user management, banks, billing, affiliate management and payouts... you just produce your content and run your site.

So that's what we did. We should not even have to be worried about some chargebacks... we should have so many sales that a few chargeback here and there are nothing to us.

But now... today... I check my stats and hope that I did not get a surge of 4 chargebacks in one day from some douche bag that charged back 4 rebills.

What happened?

Get back to the basics... we should! Star out titties and pussies, create galleries that get them interested but don't give it away, create trailers that tease and entice... NOT FULFILL!

Coke has been around for ever... do you see them giving away free 24 packs at walmart?

WTF happened...

I apologize for my common sense :)

Billers do not share data between them as that is not PCI compliant. So, just because a chargeback was made and that customer was added to a 3rd party processors database, that does not mean that they cannot shop elsewhere. You guys that are using 3rd party processors for billing do not have any control or clue what is going on with those customers as far as scrubbing, retention, cancellations, fighting chargebacks etc.. Unless you have your own MIDs and use a gateway and call center such as what NETbilling and some other gateways provide, you will be in the dark. Those customers do not belong to you, they belong to the IPSP.

Questions?

Mitch

So WTF should we do ?

Could you please give more detail on why it's not a good idea?

We talking about emails? Host your domains with a host that has a clue about hosting. I.e. way3
I have no clue what spf is but it is correct dns and rdns settings that affect emails.

Regarding chargebacks and all that shit... read the post directly above yours.

Mitch,
True;
* PCI-DSS data cannot be shared

• Credit Card Numbers
• Addresses
• Personal Identifying transactional information.

However,
https://www.iovation.com/

We do not use this but the concept is interesting

Fraud prevention should start long before that customer ever reaches a billing server.

If you are operating a website and do not pre-scrub your transacting customers at all you will have problems. Count on it :2 cents:

We dont have problems with CBs, we are fighting every one with great success.

The problems are with members emails to their yahoo/hotmail services that send it straight to spam folder.

How to fix this? We are with RealityCheck (pretty solid host). Our domains or IPs are not listed in spamhaus database.

How else do free email services detect that email is a spam? Keyword filters? Something else?

It's either a bad IP, bad DNS, or bad rDNS setting. I don't know the technical answer beyond that. But I moved from so many hosts for that very reason, email problems. You name it, I had it. Way3 fixed my issue, the owner, and it's been the best host ever and I've never had an email problem since.

You obviously have invested time in fighting chargebacks and whatever system you developed.

I fought chargebacks for about 3 months or so. I thought everything was going great and I was getting success reversals day after day. I was giddy that so many were being ruled in my favor. I thought the banks really do care about the merchant :thumbsup

Unfortunately, :( , I started getting those nasty second chargebacks. I initially didn't realize they were second chargebacks and the bank simply telling me I couldn't fight it. But, no, not the case. Visa and Mastercard word it differently but it is simply a second chargeback. The process for that to happen is the customer simply tells their bank again, I DIDN'T AUTHORIZE! Bam, now you are dinged another $25.

I analyzed my numbers and I was at exactly $0 ahead by fighting a shit ton of chargebacks.

What's your second chargeback numbers look like? If you aren't counting them, I recommend doing so and then put a spreadsheet together to analyze.

This turned out to be a pretty good business thread. :thumbsup

We can always fuck it up somehow...

Yes, we coded up our own system that's mostly automated now. In the past I was doing it by hand (filing out every dispute form) but as the sales grew, so did the CBs, and I said 'fuck this, i ain't wasting my time on this shit'. So i told our programmer to conjure sometheing up and make it automated, no excuses. And he did (fucking brilliant guy but slow as fuck)

I dont think many customers are willing to challenge the chargeback dispute because of the domain names associated with it (gay and obscene straight). And the proof we give to the bank is almost 100% solid, customer can't say "it wasn't me".


But like I said, we are having problems with fucking join emails going straight to customers spam. So they dont get the info on how to cancel, support password reminder, etc. And they start bitching and asking for refunds.

I already told you what to do. I had the exact same problem. The problem was solved by signing up for Google mail for business for all emails, using my domain. Google SPF is iron clad never goes to spam.

Engaging Beaner/Plaster can be a drawn out lost cause, you've been warned, no hate to Beaner/Plaster :2 cents:

You can use third party services like https://sendgrid.com/ to send your transactional emails.
It's super cheap and will help a lot.

Very easy to intergrate, and they alow adult (transacitonal)
See: https://sendgrid.com/solutions/transactional-email/

I recomend https://www.threatmetrix.com/ instead of iovation

Apparently so do you

Shockingly so, as soon as the many with no real knowledge of billing started reading instead of posting it got quite good.

iovation is indeed just one of the solutions that is available out there... There are many ways to prevent fraudulent customers from coming back..

Are you sending from an adult name? My customer support emails are all mainstream sounding names. Listed on billing statements and the contact us. If all settings are correct maybe your email url itself is getting caught by yahoo profanity filter or something.

But most hosts will tell you till the cows come home all email settings are correct, when they actually are not. It's usually the rDNS email setting that is not configured correctly.

The horror!

Yes I agree prevention is the only effective solution. We do reverse a few chargebacks thanks to the 3D secure that is optional (so no customer friction), but it does just a little.

Automated prevention has limits, fraud guys with nice IP addresses, emails and cards will make the transaction whatever AI systems and db's you employ. Also we got some 3d secure yet traud transactions (phishing forms also ask the 3d secure pass...) and I feel a little bad in reversing legitimate chargeback just because fraudster stole the 3d secure pass and I can reverse.

So the real prevention it is: human staff of yours to refund the suspicious transactions as soon as happened. We refund a lot of suspicious stuff and the few times we don't do because we're not sure, we get chargeback, in fact if a transaction it looks suspicious, it most likely is bad.

In case of cams, this is worst than with prerecorded content paysites - such refunds (and card blacklist) must happen before that the cash was spent with some girl. In fact, it does not look nice to chargeback the girls, is not the girl's fault if she shown to a fake money guy, the girls expect the site to be in charge of that. In fact, we have a chargeback insurance/protection of up to $250 per girl per 15 days period (which translates to $500 chargebacked, at 50% we pay to the girls).

So for a cam site, except the $25 per chargeback transaction, and the fear of hit 1%, there's also either 50% of the spent money you should pay at your loss to the girls, or, passing the chargeback to the girls which make you lose girls. Now, I remember we have NOT chargebacked any girl in the past 12+ months as none reached the $250 limit, and that happens the most years, no chargebacks.

So as a matter of curiosity I just went to check our chargeback ratios.

The 1% limit is $10k chargebacked every $1M sales.
I just checked our VXSbill reports. For last $1,038,505.00 of sales, we got $690.95 chargebacked.
This is $665.33 per $1M, or 0.06%. We can chargeback 15 times more, before to hit 1%.

I believe 0.06% (per $million) is record low CB ratio; and it always been low in past years - except a few times when we got a $4k chargeback and a $6k chargeback, at once, both quite special cases.
But 0.06% it is not just us being cool at spot frauds and refund quick. At least half of the transactions is whale we have in site since years, so safe. And regarding new guys, most of our chargebacks (or more exactly, transactions we refund quick to avoid chargebacks) come from affiliate traffic - not from our own traffic sources. Either plain frauds of affiliates trying to get the $80 PPS, or simply they send traffic that contains an high % of fraudsters, I even told some affiliates to removing links, and they had in legit tgp's or toplists next to other cam platforms, but for us it was not worth as 1 every 3 signups was fraudster, all different guys, perhaps that's the wild wide open internet?

I am pretty sure that if we had as much and varied traffic as a chaturbate or myfreecams, we would have way higher chargeback ratio whatever the 6th sense of risk department. CC's are a "technology" from 50 years ago, plastic cards. They wanted to be used on internet but it's absolutely not suited, see "CARD NOT PRESENT" chargeback reasons. This includes "friendly fraud" which is not friend at all, i.e. a guy spends then say it was not him, need to use guess and pick who to trust, that's from middle ages, before technology existed. In fact internet banking uses 2 factor authentication, with one time PIN generator hardwares, or one time passes sent to CELL each login and such. Some 3d secure is already one time pass, but most use a static pass that can be phished.
Even my cell Samsung phone you can't unlock with a pass, but with my finger only, yet is normal that guys can spend thousands dollars then say it was not them (or - it was not them really, and it was a mexican or vietnamese kid).

Ending note: bitcoin transactions it can't be chargebacked. We support bitcoin sales since years, and we get nearly no sales in bitcoin. You know what? If there was a Visa/MC system in place that can't be chargebacked or faked, perhaps people would not use it exactly because of that :)

Yes, we are sendinng straight from our website domain name, whith porn related keywords.

Do you think it's better to send from a different domain and not include the website address in the email body?

What about affiliates? NATS credits the sale to them and you can't take it out, so you have to pay affiliate on that refunded sale, and it's money lost.

We're fully custom and not using NATS.
If an affiliate sends sales that we refund, we tell the affiliate (even send email etc.), and if an affiliate causes too many refunds, we normally tell that is better if he sends that traffic to others. As a cam site we may be very different from photo/video sites I understand - a video site gets many guys who spend $20, a cam site get few guys who spends hundreds or thousands, also they chat with girls and we can see if they write broken english or tell I am from nigeria (some do). Even they pass skype to girls and we add them and pose as girls to figure their home address to send bad guys to punch in nose (joke), if chargeback, is a totally different story than prerecorded content sites.

Most of those scammers run like hell when they see our 3ds -- I guess they move on to easier marks to scam. I am good with that ... My 'sale' lost may be your next chargeback :2 cents:

Just a question regarding 3D secure

I've been recently reviewing some transactions and see an account that has a clear fraud pattern. Multiple names on cards attempted in a short sequence incl. female names etc.

However, what surprised me is many of these purchases (incl. those that were immediately reported to the biller by its cardholder for refunding) went through as 3D Secure.

These were $ 100 token packages so this should require a 3D secure verification. Of course this may differ depending on the issuing bank, for example with my bank I have it set so that an SMS verification is required with any online purchase over $ 25.

So how come these $ 100 packages went through as 3D secure if carded? All these cards were US and Canadian.

nice thread...what a change

Gotcha. I think there is such a feature in NATS but i dont want to piss off affiliates much by taking out refunded sales from them (because we already deduct chargebacks from them)

Thanks for the info.