[asterisk-users] How to deal with PayPal frauds?

[Kyle Kienapfel]

Disclaimer: I'm just a guy

Step one seems to be to delay account activation on your end. ;)
I do know that Les.net sits on payments from unverified paypal accounts for
14 days.

With all the fraud going around these days you might have to prove that the
buyer is the payer. I think you're limited in options:

Logic (Don't let someone call from africa when they just registered from an
IP in florida, maybe check the florida ip for an open proxy via an RBL list)
Delays (sit on first payments for a few days)
Try and Verify by phone or mail

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 7:45 PM, Zeeshan Zakaria <zishanov at gmail.com> wrote:

> I charge my customers through PayPal, but recently faced a fraud which
> previously had only heard about. Somebody registered a few accounts, paid
> online with paypal (as my service is only prepaid) and started making
> expensive long distance calls. In fact the IP registering the accounts was
> from Florida, and IPs making calls were from Africa. After about 20 minutes
> the first payment was reversed. Then a few times more payments were made,
> and every payment was reversed almost as soon as it was made. Payments were
> made from different PayPal accounts. And then I started getting emails from
> PayPal resolution center that some payments were made by users who didn't
> authorize them.
>
> Obviously either somebody was using stolen paypal accounts, or somebody
> knows that he can pay and reverse the payment and in the meanwhile make
> enough long distance calls. What is really fishy that reversals were made
> almost as soon as the payments were made, one after another.
>
> Those who are more experienced in this business, please advise how to avoid
> this type of fraud, and which service to use in place of PayPal, because
> PayPal doesn't seem the right payment solution for a prepaid VoIP service.
> Also now that they have all the payments put on hold and asking for a
> resolution, their resolution center is good only for shipped merchendise,
> not for online services. How would I prove to them that the buyer who is
> asking his money back has already utilized my service by making lot of
> international calls, which I now have to pay for to the carrier.
>
> --
> Zeeshan A Zakaria
>
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