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

[Zeeshan Zakaria]

Good idea Eric regarding welcome package.

-- 
Zeeshan A Zakaria

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 1:07 PM, Eric Chamberlain <eric at rf.com> wrote:

>
> On Aug 30, 2009, at 7:45 PM, Zeeshan Zakaria 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.
>
> Despite what PayPal and any of the other processors tell you in their
> marketing material, there is very little protection for online
> merchants.  The only way to be mostly sure, is to accept cash or wire
> transfers.
>
> Having said that, you might want to look into MasterCard's SecureCard
> program (
> http://www.mastercard.com/us/merchant/solutions/mastercard_securecode.html
> ).  I don't remember the exact details when a physical product is not
> involved, but the general idea is that if you enroll in the securecard
> program, you will be covered from cardholder unauthorized
> chargebacks,  Visa has something similar.  AmEx has a number you can
> call and they will verify transactions over $250 with the card holder.
>
> You might also want to consider shipping a welcome packet to the
> customer, that may cover you under PayPal's physical goods terms.
>
> --
> Eric Chamberlain, Founder
> RF.com - http://RF.com/
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com --
>
> AstriCon 2009 - October 13 - 15 Phoenix, Arizona
> Register Now: http://www.astricon.net
>
> asterisk-users mailing list
> To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
>   http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/attachments/20090831/fce2628f/attachment.htm