Transactions that are not authorized by the customer are considered fraudulent. This can often lead to chargebacks for merchants. It is best to familiarize yourself with credit card fraud and ensure you have a variety of tools and validation in place.

This guide provides an overview of how fraudulent charges are handled in Recharge and by your payment processor.

Understand fraudulent charges

When your payment processor identifies a high-risk order, Recharge will send you an automated notification alerting you of the potential fraudulent charge. Recharge receives the initial notice directly from the payment processor, so you will need to log-in to your payment processor account to assess the risk and decide if you would like to proceed with the fulfillment or reject the charge.

A charge that is marked as fraudulent will be held in your account until you approve or reject the payment. If you receive the notice of risk, it is important to take action on the charge before fulfilling the order created in your ecommerce platform. If you choose to reject the charge, you will want to cancel the order in your ecommerce platform, or directly in Recharge.

Identify fraudulent orders using fraud tools

Each payment processor provides its own fraud analysis tool for use. If you would like more information on how your payment processor identifies fraudulent orders, you can visit the Stripe, Braintree, Authorize.net, or Shopify Help Centers.

Fraud prevention best practices

For general information on fraud prevention best practices, Stripe offers tips on how to best protect your store from fraud and disputes.

Chargebacks

If you ever receive a chargeback from a customer it is important to deal with these directly via the payment processor. Recharge does not handle chargebacks or get involved with the chargeback process. If a customer issues a chargeback on an order, that order can no longer be refunded in Recharge and must be handled via the appropriate payment processor.

For more information on handling chargebacks, refer to Shopify's article What to do when customers force refunds through their bank, or BigCommerce's article What are chargebacks - and how to reduce them.