https://afcsblog.ingonoka.com/2026/03%20/ Recent content in March 2026 on AFCS Blog Hugo en https://afcsblog.ingonoka.com/post/friendly-scammers/ Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0800 https://afcsblog.ingonoka.com/post/friendly-scammers/ Unknown reference: freesvg-enthusiastic-merchant-2020 Unknown reference: freesvg-thief-mask-2014 <div id="preamble"> <div class="sectionbody"> <div class="paragraph"> <p>Authentication is nearly ubiquitous and true card-not-present fraud should be a thing of the past.</p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>Merchant scams and authorized transaction fraud, on the other hand, are a growing, but by no means a new problem. Authorized fraud used to be called “friendly” or “first party” fraud. We used this term because we assumed that the customer knew what they were doing and later regretted the purchase and used the chargeback system to get their money back.</p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>The payment schemes had no reliable statistics about the scale of the problem. Nobody truly knew how many card-not-present chargebacks were “friendly” fraud vs. justified chargebacks. I now believe that during my time in the payment industry, we did not differentiate sharply enough between actual payment fraud, malicious cardholder chargebacks and merchant scams.</p> </div>