Fraud/scam sales of digital products from different billing addresses

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment
1

Hello,

Lately I’ve been having sales from presumably bots purchasing cheap digital items to test out credit cards for fraud. Many of these sales fail, some go through and are labeled as medium or high risk.

The amount of these kind of sales has been increasing and I now get dozens per day. I’ve seen other topics on here about this problem, but they all seem to lead to one billing address that can be blocked. That’s not the case for me. Every purchase is done with a different IP, billing address, email address and credit card number.

I’ve set up a flow in Shopify to filter the medium and high risk orders, and to capture payments for low risk orders. Unfortunately it has increased my workload and it isn’t foolproof for potential fraud sales marked as low risk.

I have refunded any scam sales to prevent future charge-backs, but this causes me to have a loss due to paid transaction costs.

I’m a shop with only low price digital products, so increasing the prices isn’t possible, nor is removing every low priced item for a while.

Is anyone dealing with this? Especially with the (seemingly new) strategy of scammers using completely different information for every purchase? Any new advice, tips or tricks on how to deal with this properly myself (I’m not looking to hire anyone’s services!)?

2

I had the same issue, was getting hit 100-200 times a day from these CC testing bots.

they seem to target the newest cheapest item you have.

what i did was

  • duplicate the product so real customers can still find it.

  • keep active but hid the original the bot was targeting.

  • create a shipping profile for that item, then made the shipping location Alaska only.

doing this has prevented the bot from checking out for me and now getting 0 attempts from them because they never use a Alaska address.

hope it works for you

3

Thank you for your comment and advice!

I adapted it a little bit for myself. Because I have links to the specific product page in many places, I didn’t want to retire the already existing product and replace it with a new one.

Instead I created a new product, copied from the already existing one, made that immediately hidden for customers and made that new listing cheaper than the already existing cheapest product. So now the hidden product was both the newest product and the cheapest product in my shop. Then I set the country restriction to a random tiny country.

So far, the scam sales have switched to this new fake hidden product and the check-outs aren’t working for them. So far so good. :grinning_face:

So thanks again!