A small Stripe fraud story
Card testers are so frustrating to deal with. We run a food delivery platform coop that processes orders and then delivers them on behalf of our restaurant members. We’re an ideal card-testing target  for the perps before they hit up the Apple store. Only basic anti-fraud measures because we’re a startup and as a reward, free meal if they find a card that works.<p>The hit is usually doubly painful for us as we not only lose the money, and get the 15$ Stripe dispute fee, but we’re still on the hook for the restaurant’s food and driver’s tip and need to pay that out of pocket, and we also lose valuable time from our drivers. So all in all, a 50$ fraud might cost us 80$.<p>The signs are always obvious. Always ~70$ orders. Asking for the food to be delivered to a person across the street. Obviously fraudulent names and emails. Postal codes from elsewhere in the province. Orders from only certain restaurants. The problem, we always catch this too late through manual reviews. The restaurant usually has the food made before we find out.<p>Despite mitigations, blocking blocks of addresses (digital and physical), Radar, etc. it’s still trivial to get around and make fraudulent orders if you’re able to constantly acquire a fresh supply of new cards. We can probably build more sophisticated detection mechanisms, but we haven’t gotten there yet.<p>We’ve resorted to just cancelling the order quietly once we find out, without informing the fraudster. When they invariably call an hour later inquiring about their delivery (with a voice totally not matching the name), we either tell them we’re sending cops or cuss them out loudly. The silver lining is that it’s fun to witness their reactions on the phone when they realize they’ve been caught.<p>The banks and police are no help. There are obvious fraud patterns (we’ve physically seen the crooks and know where they live) and we have compelling evidence we can provide, but they won’t do anything. Understandably, they’re fighting the problem at a much greater scale and probably don’t have time for small peanut cases like ours, but it’s still frustrating nonetheless.