Whenever we speak to our customers, one of the biggest challenges that comes up time and time again is to do with fraud. Chargebacks and friendly fraud are common occurrences and we are always looking at new ways to help fight back. Today we have released two brand new fraud prevention features that we hope will allow our customers to take a further step in reducing fraud rates in their communities - auto banning players on chargeback and VPN/Web Proxy blocking.
VPN/Web Proxy Blocking
A brand new Enterprise feature, we have teamed up with a third-party partner to check the customer's IP for known 'red flags' for fraud:
- Web Proxies
- VPNs
- IP is used as part of a botnet/crawler network etc.
When this feature is enabled in your Fraud settings, IP addresses that are flagged for any of the above will be prevented from completing their purchase and will be directed to contact the store support. This is achieved not just by maintaining lists of 'known' IPs, but also by using machine learning and statistical analysis to weigh up the potential risk of 'unknown' IPs. Hundreds of millions of IP addresses known to be VPNs will no longer be able to checkout on your webstore, preventing users from bypassing your chargeback protection.
You can also review your log of blocked IPs and the linked usernames with the option to ban usernames/IPs that are continuing to be problematic. Of course, if you want to allow a user who does use a VPN, then you can do this by adding them to your Chargeback Whitelist.
Auto banning on chargebacks
An extension of our existing chargeback protection, all store owners can now set a local threshold for chargebacks in addition to the global setting. We know that some users may not cause issues for one store - lots of purchases, no chargebacks, but then they purchase from another community and straight away raise their chargeback risk. With the global settings that user may still have a low 'overall' chargeback rate but a high rate for that one store, so we've set out to address this.
With this new update, you are able to automatically block any user who has made "x" or more chargebacks on your specific store, regardless of the number of 'good' transactions they may have on other stores in the Buycraft network. This setting can be controlled in the Chargeback Protection area of your account and will be applied retroactively to existing transactions on your store.
More improvements on the way
We have already received some great ideas for extending these features further and we will be looking to implement these ideas as quickly as possible, however, we always want to hear from you! If you have any ideas on how to improve fraud prevention or any other features that you'd like to see then please let us know on Twitter or email us.
