GoKawiilFriendly fraud is the laundered name for something that the payment system is not really able to prevent. Even though I’m pretty sure they can do way better. Particularly big and sophisticated payment providers like Stripe, with a mountain of signals.
I had a customer buy my product twice. It’s called Ciglue. It’s cigar glue. Not Rolex or iPhone. The first order was shipped with DHL and delivered, with proof of delivery. The customer didn’t contact to request a refund or a re-delivery, but I saw a dispute filed, so I reached out to them.
They said it was the bank’s mistake because the bank bundled this payment with some real fraudulent transactions from the Philippines. They promised to contact their bank and even offered to pay me back via Paypal. I was happy that it’s just a misunderstanding. I submitted the evidence of the delivery, customer communication, website policies, everything by the book.
It turned out the customer was doing it on purpose, and lying to me. They not only didn’t contact the bank to correct the situation, they actually pretended not to have received the product. And the bank, naturally, sided with them. I had no recourse. Dispute granted. Money, product, shipping and dispute fees, all gone. This is annoying, but not exactly unheard of. If you sell online, you probably know the feeling: you send the product, collect the evidence, submit everything properly, and then somehow still lose.
Before the dispute came in, the same customer placed another order, this time with untracked shipping, and a few days after the first dispute, another dispute followed. Once the first dispute was granted, things became clear. The customer emailed me to gloat about their clever scheme. Literally giving me the finger.
I sent the screenshots to Stripe and asked if this could be reported properly. To the bank, to some fraud reporting network, or even just internally inside Stripe.
I wasn’t expecting Stripe to recover the money or reverse a closed dispute. I understand that the customer’s bank makes the final decision, and that card network rules are what they are. But I did expect the report itself to matter. This is a very clear case of “friendly fraud”. The card belonged to the customer, the address was valid etc. The customer appeared to enjoy screwing me over. Pretty sad considering this is a pretty cheap product in a niche hobby. But still.
I would have expected Stripe to use this evidence in some way to feed into the sophisticated machine-learning anti-fraud system. But No.
After quite a bit of back and forth, Stripe’s answer seems to be that it doesn’t really matter beyond my own account.
They told me they don’t use evidence of chargeback abuse from one merchant to create cross-merchant fraud signals, or to take action against the customer’s card, email, or other details for other merchants.
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