We’ve been getting contacted about our name showing up on people’s credit card statements after they see an ad for a toolset on Facebook (the deal is too good to be true) and they never send the item. Obviously, the chargebacks aren’t impacting us since we aren’t the ones that charged them, but people are thinking we are scamming them until we explain it isn’t us. We’ve reported their site to Shopify but they seem to change their site account regularly and their Facebook ads get placed by new accounts all the time so while we report them whenever we can they seem to just pop up again immediately.
Has anyone had this happen? Or know the best way to combat them?
Sorry to hear that - did you try contacting Facebook regarding this? They probably will have more power over blocking them from posting new ads or creating new ad accounts.
Shopify support was no help. They basically didn’t do anything even when I sent them a bunch of shopify urls that were running the scam. Same with facebook I report the ads and the accounts running them (I assume they aren’t all using our name but they are all similar to the screenshots victims have shared with us).
I haven’t found a way to actually email or call someone at Facebook . A few times a day I search the market place for ads like the ones victims have sent us and report the ads and the account running it. But it seems they just make a new account and run new ads and Facebook doesn’t care since they make money. Some of the accounts even have reviews from over 6 months ago that complain about being scammed and the account is still running scam ads.
I’ve been searching for similar ads to what one of the victims sent screenshots of and reporting them on facebook and I save the url the ad leads to so I can send them to shopify support. Hasn’t helped though.
Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten any solution or help from Shopify. I’ve called, emailed, used chat, I even sent a twitter dm to the founder/ceo when nothing else got their attention. I’ve tried every way of explaining it and I’ve tried to get it escalated to someone higher up and been promised someone higher up would help and nothing. I’ve even tried being angry so they’d take it seriously, but sadly they don’t care. We’ve still been getting reports of it happening, but I’ve been reporting the accounts that are posting the ads and also messaging them on facebook to say “I’m reporting all these ads, please stop using my companies name in your scams” with the hopes that they will get tired of me and change the name. Maybe it is working, the last few reports we’ve gotten were for charges made at the end of February, so that might be a good sign we might be finally getting them to stop. I would recommend asking victims for screenshots or as much info on what they ordered and find those ads by searching facebook market place for those keywords and reporting the ads, the accounts running them and leaving a review to let people know not to order from them and if their account allows it send them a message letting them know you are aware of their scam and they better stop using your business name or you’ll keep reporting all their ads. It’s not a great solution but unless facebook or shopify decide to make things more secure it’s the best option I’ve found.
we haven’t ever used stripe as a payment option. That’s more for point of sale, right? We are online only. From what I can tell the scammers are just using our brand name or url in the “customer statement descriptor field.” See the screenshot below. This can changed anytime and there is nothing requiring it to be verified, accurate, or match your store or brand name. So I don’t think these scammers have hacked or gained any access to our store, our name on the credit card statement is just to make it harder for the victims to track them down so they can make the money disappear before the bank can reverse the transaction.
We just had this occur. The victim (card holder) did not know where she made the purchase, but said that she did and when it showed up on her Amex she called the card company because she never received the order. The card company gave her the transaction info they had which fraudulently showed our stores website (oddly as the company name…which is not correct) and had our phone number (obviously pulled from our website or google listing). I hope Shopify has this behavior on it’s radar. Even though it does not directly effect us financially, it does cause us wasted time out of our day contacting these wild messages about charges we did not initiate. Potentially leading to unsuspecting customers to badmouth our business.
I have been having this exact issue starting last week. I have had 3 different people email me and one was kind enough to send me a photo of how it is being shown on his credit card statement and someone is clearly using our name and website to cover up these fraudulent charges. I have explained to each customer that is it not coming from our company, but clearly it can still be very damaging to our reputation. I have reported it to Shopify, no answer, and have reported it on IC3.gov as well. Not sure how to get this resolved since whoever is scamming these people is able to put whatever company name they want down for what appears on credit card statements. How did you find out who the company was who was doing this?
We never received any help from Shopify. I tried every way of contacting support and showing them the scammers were using Shopify for these scams. I was even promised that they would escalate it and someone would get back to us two times and neither promise was kept. It’s pretty disappointing and frustrating that Shopify doesn’t care to stop scammers from exploiting the Shopify platform to harm legitimate users like us, at the very least you’d think it wouldn’t take much work to implement, some sort of filter so when a merchant uses an existing shops name, url or other contact info that Shopify has on file it could be blocked.
After months of dealing with angry emails, we finally seem to be free from this scam for now. This took us finding some of the scam accounts (luckily a victim had screenshots of a Facebook account and the ads) and constantly reporting their ads to Facebook and going to the page listing the ad and reporting it as well. I would also send a dm to the page if messages were enabled explaining that I believed they were using our companies info to scam people and I would be reporting their ads and their pages constantly until they stopped. I also searched for keywords related to the item they seemed to be using most for the scam (in our case people were buying a power toolset for $99 that retails for $599) and I would find other accounts posting the same scam and report them as well. This was time-consuming and frustrating, but with Facebook and Shopify not showing any interest in stopping these scams it was our only option to fight them. I would still try and bug Shopify about this maybe even send a dm to the CEO on Twitter. Maybe if enough of their legit customers are getting mad at their inaction something will change.
Unfortunately, customers are simply contacting me telling me that they have noticed a charge by my website, but that they never ordered anything. I don’t think they know where the charge is coming from and I haven’t heard anything about Facebook ads or them even buying anything at all. They are simply checking their bank or credit card statements and seeing an unfamiliar charge that has my company name and website listed as the place that is charging them for some sort of “subscription” (we don’t sell any type of subscription). I can only image how many others there are who maybe don’t check their statements as closely:(
It really is unfortunate that you can list whatever name/info you want for how you want the charge to appear and it doesn’t require some sort of verification. That leaves ALL companies open for these scammers to exploit them…Shopify included. Imagine if these scammers decided to act like it was Shopify charging them?!
I’m really not sure what else to do, but to keep responding to these emails explaining to people that they need to contact thier credit card companies and request a new card because their info has been compromised, and that is it NOT coming from our website.
Thanks again and if you find out anything else, please let me know.
Since yesterday, I started getting phone calls about spammers using our store name. I don’t have details like links if they have clicked any. I am thinking to post on my facebook about this spammers. I have already called Shopify and reported. As usual, they don’t see any thing.
Yes the same thing is happening to us now people are calling our store saying we have charged their credit cards and we haven’t calls are getting out of control we called the BBB and they are no help today we filed a police report
We are in the same situation, we haven’t even launched our website yet and we are getting hundreds of people turning up to our website and we are being contacted claiming we charged them when we haven’t. Has anyone found a way to stop this! We are asking them to send us a link to the website or the ad they purchased from to try and report it on facebook but it’s not stopping. We are just hoping they stop using our name soon!
