Hey, sucks to be a merchant, huh? I’ve had people do charge-backs without any legitimate reason, knowing what a pia it would be for me to pursue the matter.
Honestly, I’m sort of fuzzy on that. As a merchant, we’ve been lucky in that we’ve only had to deal with a few charge backs. One of them was 100% my fault. We had to give back the money (I keyed in a card wrong and charged someone else, I didn’t fight it at all). Second time it was someone that either forgot that the ordered from us or didn’t recognize the charge, no chargeback happened. The third time it was a stolen card, but everything was done ‘properly’ and IIRC we got to keep the money. I didn’t want to mention it, because, as I mentioned, I’m a bit fuzzy on the details since it was so long ago and I didn’t want to argue with someone jumping in to mention that it seems like such an easy crime. Why doesn’t the scammer, just run the scam with a friend? Then he wouldn’t have to go through all the BS of trying to trick a victim, deal with Western Union and state lines etc… Just have your friend (who has a merchant account) run the card for some huge amount and split the money. When the charge back comes through, just play dumb and show CC company all the info you have to prove it was, as far as you could tell, a legit sale. Bank eats the money, scammer and merchant get paid.
Damn, I never knew that. Ignorance fought.
kayaker, are you saying there is a mechanism in place, but its too difficult for you to deal with? Even if its a case of a stolen purse, 10 fast purchases over a 45 minute period, followed by a “stolen credit card” report, complete with police report?
I guess I am less than 100% informed on the specifics of my credit card agreement. My employees tell me that “it’s complicated” with differences between cards presented in person & phone orders.
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished Department:
Tried to contact local FBI, but could find only long online report forms, no email addresses. Tried another FBI scam report online, but I never paid a cent, so I’m unable to do it that way.
Finally found an email addy for FBI in the city where I was supposed to send the moneygram. I forwarded all the email exchanges, along with a summary. The account I was using is a throwaway account I use for spammy type things.
So far, we have had several back and forth emails questioning why the account uses an alias in place of my real name, etc. Maybe I’m gonna wind up on the no-fly list.
I quit. Seriously. I. will. never. initiate. contact. with. law. enforcement.
Are you making up a name to use with the FBI???
Because if you’re trying to report a scam in progress to the FBI, but you’re making up a name and wondering why they’re not taking you seriously, then I’m done here. You’re being deliberately uncooperative.
And how is he supposed to know which bank issued the card? All he knows is the number and that it’s a Mastercard. One would think that if suspected fraud is reported to Mastercard, they would alert the bank which issued the card, since only they are going to know the identity of said bank.
Of course not. I forwarded the email exchange to the FBI. I signed the email and ID’d myself with my real name. The email account is a hotmail account that I use for crap, and the email account has an alias. He is/was questioning my use of a throw away email account. Fuck this.
Besides this involving another person in the fraud, credit card companies keep track of merchants very closely. They will let a small percentage of these deals slide if they can’t prove the merchant was culpable, but too many will get the merchant’s account cancelled. In the middle, they may increase the charge to the merchant for accepting ANY of their cards.
That’s just for starters…
When I worked in a bar, one of the other bouncers came over and told me what had just happened to him.
It seems he was approached by someone wanting to sell drugs for under cost, because they “had too much”. This “Seller” attempted to allay the bouncers initial scepticism with “I think the cops are after me, and I just want to get rid of it”.
We figured he was an undercover cop or a narc. I was never involved in that scene, but even to me that smelled fishy as hell.
My thought for that plan was that you could really only do it one time with each merchant.
Either that or the guy was just going to sell the bouncer a handful of Excedrin/Tylenol/Advil with the letters scratched off. “Here man, I got 50 tabs of X. I’ll sell them to you for for $200, you can EASILY sell them for $10 a piece, but you gotta do it now, cuz I think the cops saw me selling them at the last place.” Especially since this guy figures the bouncer has a lot of cash on him if it’s a place with a cover charge.
No you just need a crooked or hacked interpreter.
You know, I dont remember what he was supposedly selling. I’m curious now. I think I still have the other guy on facebook and I might ask him if he remembers.