No online merchant will be surprised to hear chargebacks are rising. In the last year alone, more than three out of four customers in the United Kingdom and United States filed a chargeback — an all-time high. The global volume of chargebacks is expected to reach $165B in 2024. During the COVID pandemic, chargebacks became popular for their convenience and safety. Customers shopped online in their droves while physical stores were closed, but people were also less inclined to go through the returns process, which usually still involved an in-store visit or a trip to the post office. However ..read more

Here’s a story about Chris, an honest consumer buying his partner a gift on your ecommerce site. Chris fills his cart and clicks to complete the purchase.  Then, the unexpected happens. Chris’s card issuer refuses to authorize the transaction. Maybe Chris was shopping while on an overseas trip, the gift he chose was unusually pricy, or the issuer has low thresholds for merchants like you. Regardless, Chris gets annoyed because he’s been unjustly denied, and he blames you. So he abandons his cart and decides to shop elsewhere. You’ve lost the sale, lost a good customer, and likely paid th ..read more

Fraud managers and analysts know how much work it can take to win a chargeback dispute. In addition to curating evidence, analysts spend their time manually consolidating and organizing data, divvying up work, formatting and submitting evidence, and tracking status. And when you want to track overall program performance, there’s more manual work ahead of you. Make no mistake, analysts can contribute significantly to winning disputes, which makes tedious tasks a waste of their expertise and insight. If menial work takes up too much of the analyst’s time, win rates suffer because they are focus ..read more

Across the ecommerce organization, from marketers to webmasters, the post-holiday period brings high-fives and sweet relief. Everyone gets to recover a bit after the insanity of the Q4 shopping season.  Everyone except for fraud managers, that is. In the fraud prevention world, insanity season is just beginning. There’s a deluge of returns and the potential of returns abuse that follows gift-giving season — and there’s a mind-boggling volume of chargebacks to review, dispute, and track.  These factors combine to create the notorious “holiday hangover” familiar to fraud teams in the ..read more

This content was paid for and produced by Riskified in partnership with the Commercial Department of the Financial Times. Minimizing risk exposure is a core responsibility for CFOs in any organization. In ecommerce, the danger of a major fraud attack is always lurking, creating not only a constant threat of catastrophic losses, but also an ongoing forecasting nightmare – a concern especially acute for public companies. Chargebacks, in particular, are a forecasting wildcard. With legacy anti-fraud strategies, chargebacks represent a huge unknown: will a company lose nothing next quarter to cha ..read more

Accountability is the glue that holds our operations together. It's about taking responsibility for maintaining the integrity of our business environment. Just as we're responsible for the well-being of our families and communities, as executive leaders, we're accountable for our teams' success and the outcomes they achieve. However, confusion often arises between accountability and consequences. Consider hiring someone to park your car – if they damage it and you decide not to hire them again, that's a consequence. But you're still left with a damaged car that requires costly repairs. On the ..read more

Ever heard of the Australia Payments Network (AusPayNet) CNP Fraud Mitigation Framework? If not, you’re not alone. And you’re fortunate. Merchants taking card-not-present (CNP) payments in Australia often learn the hard way about this fraud-reduction program when they get dinged for excessive chargebacks by the Australian Payments Network (AusPayNet). How do we know? Because they frequently then call us for help: “What do I do now?” Riskified can help address the issue (see below) or can even help you avoid the situation altogether with a little understanding of how the Framework operates. He ..read more

Crime pays (a lot), according to Riskified data. Our recent analysis on how fraudsters make money shows it takes just 90 minutes of work per week for them to reap returns from malicious activity — and with a $30k weekly investment, fraudsters can generate more than $50k in weekly revenue. Despite this easy payday, there’s plenty that merchants can do to put fraudsters out of business. Breaking Down the Ecommerce Fraudster Business Model From obtaining stolen credit card details to buying and deploying a shopping bot and checking and tweaking strategy, the daily tasks of an online fraudster ar ..read more

Effective April 2023, Visa is launching the Compelling Evidence (CE) 3.0 initiative to update compelling evidence requirements for fraud category chargebacks. Merchants who submit evidence adhering to the updated criteria will not only successfully overturn the chargeback, but will also shift liability to the issuer. Previously, liability shift could not be obtained using the chargeback dispute process, only by implementing authentication at the time of purchase (e.g. using 3DS). Under Visa CE 3.0, merchants can shift liability to the issuer by establishing a legitimate purchase pattern accor ..read more

May 11, 1997, was a watershed moment. Gary Kasparov, then the no. 1 ranked chess player in the world, lost a match in under 20 moves to IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue. Despite a temporary rally, the match ended with a 3.5-2.5 win to the machine, reversing Kasparov’s triumph just 15 months earlier.  The famous match was seen as a sign that Artificial Intelligence (AI) was catching up to human intelligence. IBM’s then-CEO Louis Gerstner announced, "what we have is the world's best chess player vs. Gary Kasparov." The Weekly Standard summed up the event with an article titled “Be Afraid.” A ..read more