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Comment by tinyprojects | Hacker News Reader

I was on Stripe Radar's free trial, but it wasn't as effective as I liked - it also turned out to be very pricey paying £0.04/screened transaction. I've now rolled my own combination of IP-based bans on creating checkout links + notifications if a purchase has many failed attempts using diff cards (you can do this for free through Stripe's API). I refund suspected fraudulent transactions religiously without question as the $20 dispute fee is crippling, and have systems that will auto-generate and submit evidence to banks whenever I receive a dispute. I wish Stripe would do more to help!

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Out of interest, how effective do you find challenging the chargebacks is in practice?

I always thought about automating this (or for lost delivery claims with shipping companies) but the numbers never worked out for it to be worth it because the success rate seemed like it would be so low.

I've only trialled this system recently, but my current results are:

1 Win

2 Partial Wins (basically a loss with how much you get back)

3 Losses

All these payments were fraudulent (a user doing credit card testing) and disputed by foreign banks (Thailand, Malaysia, Brazil). I think these cases are much harder to win, because the actual card holder is technically in the right to request the money back on their stolen card for a transaction they didn't do.

Much better than my previous results of just accepting each dispute though :)

Thanks. Are your charges much more than the chargeback processing fee?

One of the issues for us was that while the chargeback processing fee was ~£20, the order values were only ~£100-300, so even in the worst case of ~£320 lost, multiplied by roughly 1 in 10 non-fraud mistaken chargebacks, and 50% win rate, the value is only £16. At that amount it would take a lot to recoup the development costs. These are all very rough numbers, but illustrative I think.

Much less - 99% of our transactions are < $20, so every time we get hit with a dispute it's already an instant loss in terms of the dispute fee cancelling out any revenue gained back from winning the dispute.

It would be awesome to hear/see more about the system you built to auto-generate and submit evidence. This is a huge pain for many companies which an open source tool could solve.

Sure! I basically use PDF Lib to generate a letter with all my evidence bundled into one pdf file. It sucks up data from my database about the user's activity. Format is the following:

Formal 1 page letter with company logo - "Dear Sir/Madam.. writing about $9.99 dispute for card XXXX on X date for user [NAME]" (all this is pulled from the Stripe API).

I then have 5 appendixes on separate pages:

Appendix 1: Users' receipt (just a pic of the Stripe receipt)

Appendix 2: User's order history (just printed, name of items, price, and timestamp)

Appendix 3: Screenshot of the user's purchases page clearly showing the item

Appendix 4: Email confirmations - I store copies of each HTML email sent, so just take a picture of this.

Appendix 5: Site activity with IP addresses and timestamps. This is all user actions on my site (viewing items, purchasing, etc.)

I created it because I had 20 disputes piling up, and I was dreading processing them all. Given that you're likely to lose the majority of disputes, it's super discouraging to put in the work, but this makes it a bit easier (I don't want to let fraudsters just get away with it!).

Figure out a way to suck up this data through Stripe API alone and this is potentially a product

Almost feels like you could provide this to other merchants in some way/shape/form.

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