Ecommerce fraud abuses online orders, payments, or accounts so that a shop or a customer bears a loss they never accepted.
It is shop specific, covering false orders, abused accounts, and payment disputes, rather than every kind of online deception.
How it works
Losses show up as unpaid goods, charges a cardholder did not make, refunds that do not match a real return, or accounts taken over to place orders.
This page does not explain how to test payment instruments or how to defeat shop checks.
Shops reduce harm with limits on new accounts, review of unusual orders, and a way for customers to dispute a charge quickly.
Automated checkout abuse becomes more expensive when each attempt must spend real effort, which is a cost control rather than a promise of zero fraud.
Concrete examples
- A burst of orders from new accounts ships to addresses that do not match any prior customer history.
- A customer reports a charge for goods they never ordered, and the shop finds the account password was reused elsewhere.
- Refund requests arrive for deliveries that tracking shows were never returned to the warehouse.
Protective measures
- Review orders that combine a new account, a new address, and a high value before you ship them.
- Give customers a clear dispute path, and pause fulfillment when a cardholder reports an unrecognized charge.
- Limit how fast a new account may place orders until a short history looks consistent.
- Measure refund abuse separately from unpaid orders so the control you tighten matches the loss you actually see.
How CDPCaptcha helps
Proof of work raises the cost of automated checkout abuse that tries to place fraudulent orders at scale.
CDPCaptcha is a self-hosted proof of work check in the browser, with no cookies, no tracking, and no picture puzzles.
It is made and hosted in the EU, in Germany, and the service is described at https://cdpcaptcha.com/.