Owner, Joe Morgan, Published in Forbes
Owner of Morgansites, Joe Morgan, was recently published in Forbes with an article titled “The Real Victims of Credit Card Fraud.”
The Real Victims Of Credit Card Fraud
By Joe Morgan, Owner of Joe’s Datacenter and Morgansites.com
Recently I was attending a local chamber event when I heard a lady nearby complaining about a rideshare company. Apparently there was a charge on her credit card from the company, although she had never used it. When she called their customer service, they refused to give her a refund, because they couldn’t prove she wasn’t the one using the card at the time. Her complaints to a crowded room were clear: This company is no good. But should they have been held completely responsible?
Let’s say you have a $20 bill that has been stolen, and it’s marked in a unique way that you would be able to recognize it. Now let’s say you’re out at a restaurant, and when getting change, you get that unique $20 bill handed to you. Should you demand that you receive another $20 because that $20 was obviously stolen? Should the restaurant then be responsible for the stolen $20 because it accepted it, despite not knowing it was stolen?
Online merchants take all the risk in offering a way for the customer to make a purchase using their credit cards. When there is a payment issue, consumers can easily ask for their money back, and over time, many credit card companies have made it an easy process. It’s the business that really hurts from the situation because they either have to issue a refund or they see a chargeback from the bank, often taken directly from the business’s bank account, without warning.
Unfortunately, I know this from personal experience. After a major credit card breach, my company suddenly started getting a high volume of fraudulent orders on our website. These orders had all of the correct personal information, such as the person’s name and address, as well as the full credit card details. When the orders came in, nothing looked suspicious. That month, we had over forty chargebacks that resulted in thousands of dollars in fees and tens of thousands of dollars in refunds, and we were out the services that we’d provided.
When the real people saw our business name and phone number on their credit card statements, they assumed we were the ones scamming them. I spent hours talking to people who had had their identities stolen, trying to explain to them that we were not the ones who had stolen from them. Our merchant services company of 10 years, without notice, started holding all our bank deposits, even as we quickly worked to resolve the issue. We verified old orders and refunded any fraudulent orders that had not been caught yet. We also alerted the people of their stolen identities and urged them to call their banks and cancel their cards.
Other published articles that feature Joe:
Kansas City Business Journal – March 2, 2020
Kansas City Business Journal – January 23, 2020
