At this point, it is clear that I am being targetted for credit card fraud.

Selling on Amazon
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In 2017 I received 1 chargeback.
In 2018 it was 0.
In 2019 it was 3.
In 2020 it was 5.
In 2021 it was 14.
In 2022 it was 17.
In 2023 it was 9.
In 2024 18 through October.

This progression reflects an increase in our sales, and increased influence of a specific coworker (and a possible increase in the criminality of Amazon buyers). The chargebacks were on orders ranging from $15 up to $400, with most filed on orders between $100 - $200. The orders were mostly for random single items. With the exception of a couple chargebacks that weren’t defended because I was out of the office and nobody else even reads the email much less checks our notifications, I defended the chargebacks and won nearly all of them. The ones I lost were almost all cases where I won the chargeback, then the buyer reopened it and the claim was automatically lost.

Then in November, things went off the rails.

Starting in November, I started getting chargebacks for large orders of multiple items, between 5 to 15 of an item, on multiple orders from the same customer. A buyer would place between 2 and 7 orders for the same quantity of the same item, then once they were all received filed chargebacks for all of them at once.

The value of the chargebacks is now $350 - $1100. Since Dec 1st 2024, I have had 69 chargebacks totaling just over $30,000. None of the buyer accounts filing these claims have ever purchased from me before (not surprising). The items on the orders were focused on 4 or 5 of my best selling items.

I checked the delivery addresses of the items across all the orders looking for patterns, but none of the different buyer accounts shipped to the same address. Delivery addresses spanned from California to Florida to Wisconsin.

I did notice that some of the buyer accounts had several cancelled orders before the successful ones. This makes me think the buyers are using stolen credit cards to place the orders, and the chargebacks are being filed by the actual cardholders who have nothing to do with this.

I have not been able to find a report of chargebacks against my FBA orders, so I have no way of knowing if this is limited to FBM.

I am certain that my account is being targeted for some kind of credit card fraud and I don’t know what I can do about it.

I am :rage:

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Certainly could be any number of different scams going on.

Certainly a simple one could be the use of you to drop ship for the scammer.

Are this proprietary products or generally available products?

Some investigation to see if you can find someone on the internet who is selling these products who is not authorized to sell them and legitimate.

Credit card numbers are available on the dark web and many people from countries like Pakistan, Turkey and Sri Lanka are being trained in various types of selling fraud.

I would suspect you are correct about the real cardholders filing the claim, but I think that would be viewed as non-service related chargebacks and both Ebay and Amazon usually cover such claims.

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These are widely available items. One is a thermostat, a zone valve, a valve actuator, a switching relay…

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Just wondering how your account still open with all those hits to your ODR?

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This is really curious because fraudulent use of a credit card is an Amazon issue. They should be covering the cost and there should be no hit to your account.

Unfortunately there is nothing you can do about it. Amazon holds all the information.

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These are all the claims filed against me, but I haven’t lost them all. If I had that would be very bad.

My chargeback ODR is currently 0.04%.
I have significant sales volume to cover the metrics hits of the few I do lose.

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Amazon FU of the day quote right there.

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Fraudulent use is a non-service chargeback. You used to be able to determine whether it was a non-service chargeback if Amazon did not apply a hold when you were notified of the dispute and asked for a representation.

Given the time which has passed since I was affected I do not know whether that is still the case. Perhaps someone who has had a recent chargeback which was not associated with a hold can share, and it might cast a little light on exactly what is happening now,

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A buyer placed 3 orders for about a thousand dollars each in early Feb. The first order had a chargeback filed a few weeks ago. The second was last night. I know that a chargeback on the third order is coming, but there is nothing I can do but sit here and wait for it.
GRRRR.

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May the Force be with you

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Someone filed another one of these chargebacks. In my chargeback page on Seller Central, this order appears 3 times, 2 of them were automatically resolved in my favor. One went to pending status, and was eventually decided against me, and the order was fully refunded for nearly $1000.

What the he…ck is going in with chargebacks?

EDIT: At least I was able to appeal this last chargeback. So that’s something.

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yes but if they keep filing the chargeback Amazon eventually caves and makes you responsible.

They may defend it a 2nd time but not a 3rd

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We have already discussed that here, and I maintain that Amazon has shifted their policies to auto-rejection of even the second claim since you last dealt with this issue. But that is neither here nor there.

The buyer only filed it once. The chargeback appearing 3 times with different resolutions at the exact same time (the three email notifications I received all came through at the same second) is clearly some kind of glitch or mistake. The buyer would not have been able to reopen the claim until the first claim had been denied, and that took several hours.

In any event, my appeal was accepted and the decision reversed by Amazon, not the buyer’s credit card company. They were reversing their own decision to close the case against me due to my non-responsiveness, which it turns out was entirely fictional. I do not believe it is possible to appeal a normal chargeback decision as it is generally the bank, not Amazon, that makes those decisions.

The fact that Amazon was willing to reimburse me at all suggests the claim was actually denied by the buyer’s bank (which it should have been from the beginning) or else Amazon would have denied my appeal regardless of the grounds. So it is possible that the buyer could re-open the claim and cause me the headache you suggest, but thankfully those cases are less common, even for me in the midst of this interminable chargeback nonsense.

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The third chargeback came through last night. Amazon automatically resolved it in my favor, which is nice. Maybe they are catching on to some of these thieves, or maybe their banks are catching on.

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I had only 2 chargebacks in April, but 4 this morning alone, 3 of which were purchases from the same buyer going to the same address for 10 pieces of an item on each order. The chargebacks all have the code for Mastercard “No Cardholder Authorization” so I’m guessing these “buyers” are using stolen credit card numbers and disposable buyer accounts. I really was hoping this was over but it is not. I’m so sick of defending these.

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That is not even supposed to be your problem. I guess Amazon is trying to pass the buck hoping you will not argue.

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Yepper; that’s why certain of our chargeback defenses include mention of the published policy referenced in this 041525 SAS post:

The DBD* (“Defective By Design”) Business Model for Provisioning Customer Support was neither originated or perfected by Amazon, but it would seem to be fairly evident that its own embrace of it, lo these many years now passed (not solely in its lower tiers of support), has in large degree played an outlandish role in promulgating fraud.

On more than just one front, dammit.

*

“DBD” is probably the most-commonly used acronym to describe the ‘Defective By Design’ paradigm, but there exist others, not all of which are necessarily easily-relatable to the concept @ first glance.

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With AtoZ claims and SAFE-T claims, Amazon has a vested interest in the seller losing the claim. The buyer is happy, Amazon doesn’t lose money, and who cares if the seller loses money? If the seller wins the claim, either the buyer or Amazon themselves is out some money, and either hurts Amazon’s bottom line.

With chargebacks, it’s the banks themselves who make the decisions, not Amazon. If the buyer is upset, it will be with their credit card not Amazon. If anything, Amazon would have an interest in winning the claim as if the charge is reversed I assume they forfeit their cut of the sale too.

Amazon is more than happy to throw sellers under the bus, but I don’t think chargebacks are part of that wide-ranging ethos.

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This had slowed down considerably for the past 3 months, but it’s ramping up again.
sigh

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10 more chargebacks in the month of October, which isn’t even over yet. That makes a whopping 87 chargebacks so far this year, heading into my busiest months.

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