There are many untrustworthy people on the internet. Chargebacks recently became a common practice for scammers and a huge issue for e-tailers. Honest store owners risk losing both the money and the product they paid for. Unfortunately, most e-stores don’t take any precautions against scammers. Don’t let your store be one of the easy targets.

1. How can you get ahead of scammers?

With API 2.0 comes a variety of new features and perhaps the most important one is the risk score. It allows you to gain control over suspicious orders made by your clients. Getting the money or a video game key back from a scammer is almost impossible so from now on you’ll be able to prevent scams beforehand.

2. How does the risk score work?

It’s a solution based on the experience we’ve gained over the years in the digital distribution industry. The algorithm developed by CodesWholesale IT team is cross-referencing the data your client provides directly and indirectly while placing an order. There are factors that immediately strike as being suspicious – for example making payment from TOR browser or a fake email domain – but risk score is also successful in picking up more nuanced signals. The risk of a transaction is estimated, and if the score is equal or higher than the value you provided, the order gets suspended. From that point the administrator steps in – he can manually fulfill the order. In the plugin configuration, you can set your own risk score value. Based on our experience, we recommend you to set it at 1.5.

3. What data about your clients get analyzed to estimate the risk?

Clients’ history, email addresses, IPs, payment emails and user agents are the essential pieces of information for assessing the risk of any transaction. These data are found by the algorithm automatically and are next evaluated and compared with previous activities of the client.

4. What happens after transaction gets suspended?

For example, your client bought a few games from you and paid for his or her order with a stolen credit card. The risk score is evaluated as 8.0. The transaction gets blocked which means that the keys weren’t sent and no funds were drawn from your account balance on CodesWholesale. Now you decide what happens next – you can either ignore the risk and fulfill the order in your store’s dashboard, or issue a refund to a suspicious client.

5. How do you know if it was a real fraud?

You never know for sure, but you are spared the opportunity to learn it the hard way. The higher the rate, the less advisable it is to fulfill the order, but you, as the store owner, have to make this decision on your own. You can, for example, research clients’ emails and IPs on forums to find out if other retailers complained about being scammed by them.

The point of risk score is to give you the upper hand in the battle with untrustworthy clients and to indirectly increase the profitability of your online business. Update your API to the newest version now, and enjoy a new standard of safety.

About the author

Elliot
Elliot
Content specialist and gaming enthusiast. Trained to be a philosopher. Interested in Deep Learning, scalability and startups.