One of the great consumer benefits that credit card companies offer its users is the ability to dispute a credit card charge if there is a problem with a purchase. Disputes can happen for many legitimate reasons including unauthorized charges, being charged twice for the same transaction, being charged for something you returned or something that was never received,
and the list goes on, and when a credit card user wins a dispute, the credit card company creates a chargeback, or essentially refunds the customer.
When it comes to committing fraud, chargebacks are an all too common method that is used to try to abuse the system that was originally meant to protect consumers. This is especially true in the travel industry where 60–80% of all chargebacks are “friendly fraud”. (Friendly fraudsters make genuine transactions, but report false claims or escalate issues to get around things like non-refundable bookings and cancellation fees.)
In the travel industry, what was once a single purchase (for example, an airline seat), has now become multiple transaction coming from various channels at multiple times. The seat is booked first, while baggage fees, upgrades, meals, wifi, and other ancillary revenue sources are often booked later. This creates added risk that the ancillaries to the original booking are not linked, which leads to customer frustration and increases the likelihood of friendly fraud chargebacks.
Today’s customers expect a seamless digital travel booking experience while the increasing complexity of those interactions continues to create technical challenges. The volume of chargebacks in the travel industry has skyrocketed in recent years due to changes in customer expectations, behavior, and more complex purchase processes.
At Auryc, we never anticipated that we would become a go-to source for our clients to dramatically reduce chargeback fraud. It turns out that when you capture and automatically index every single customer interaction, while also creating high fidelity replays of every session, using Auryc to fight fraudulent chargebacks is a no-brainer!
Over time, several of our clients have discovered the power of leveraging Auryc as a system of record, resulting in winning over 80% of fraudulent chargebacks and recovering millions of dollars of additional revenue each year.
If you are in a similar situation, here are 7 types of information you’ll want to have in order to have a greater chance of winning fraudulent digital chargeback cases:
- Screenshots providing payment authorization from the customer. (Auryc’s Replay technology does this out of the box.)
- Email correspondence between merchant and customer. (Easily captured.)
- Proof of purchase screenshots (Captured with Auryc’s Replay technology.)
- Your site’s terms of service (Captured with Auryc’s Replay technology.)
- User’s IP address, ISP (Captured with Auryc’s analytics engine.)
- Customer’s username (if applicable) (Captured with Auryc’s analytic engine.)
- Service usage times, dates, Etc. (Captured with Auryc’s analytics engine.)
How to Reduce Fraudulent Chargebacks Before They Happen:
In addition, there are several red flags that can be identified (if you have the data…as Auryc does) to stop a purchase before it becomes a (non-friendly) fraudulent chargeback:
- Purchase within N days of departure. (In travel, this means if a large vacation package is being made right before the trip is scheduled to happen, the odds of fraud increase dramatically.)
- First time visitor purchases
- Big ticket purchases
- Abnormal multiple purchases from the same IP address
- Abnormal multiple purchases from the same user
- 4+ attempts before purchase
- Multiple credit cards same session
- Copy and paste data on payment page
- Expiration date guessing
- Last name of card holder is not on traveler list
- Card holder zip code is greater than 100 miles from place of departure
- …and there are many more.
Clearly, many of the flags above could represent completely legitimate purchases, and your data may display a different fraud profile from other companies, which is why it’s very important to understand your own data and your own customers before taking any action that could negatively impact legitimate customer transactions.
For Auryc clients, fighting fraud has become easier than ever because they now have a source of record for every digital interaction. (Even hard to track actions like “copy and pastes”, purchases across multiple visits, expiration date guessing, and more.).
Once you create a “fingerprint” for chargeback fraud, consider adding a minimal amount of friction to the purchase process in order to make sure the real purchases still get through, while giving yourself a little more time to vet potential fraud before it happens.