I founded an e-commerce marketplace startup. We use PayPal's Multiparty APIs (PayPal Commerce Platform) for checkout. For the 10 days, someone has been bombarding us with purchases that they later dispute. There's consistent pattern to it:
* They use an email address that has no footprint online, always from the same two domains * They use an unverified PayPal account to pay * They pay a low amount, not always the same, in a narrow range for a digital item * All of the charges were disputed within a few hours
They're not doing this through our API. The purchase process requires a browser because of the way our payment form is configured. There's an amount of variation to each purchase that tells us they're automating a browser. Logs indicate that they're changing IP each time. The events come in bursts and seem to be spaced to avoid automated detection.
We added the typical mitigations to our network stack and code. A few are still slipping through. Logs indicate a high amount of bot traffic.
PayPal does not seem equipped to deal with this. Their support is always extremely slow, relies on canned responses, and to date has a very limited understanding of how their own Multiparty APIs work. Their phone support people will not talk with me, they see no indication that my PayPal account is affiliated with these purchases in any way. They want each of our sellers to contact them independently, which we know will result in disparate cases that don't tell the complete story or offer any assistance.
Has anyone encountered anything like this before? We're struggling to find the motive or intended outcome by the attacker(s). We're a small company with a niche audience, we've never had a conflict with anyone that got serious enough that we'd expect them to come after us like this.
Any thoughts and recommendations would be greatly appreciated. We feel like we are on our own here and are unsure of how to handle it.
We're struggling to find the motive or intended outcome by the attacker(s).
The highest likelihood for me is that they're doing card/credential testing. They have either stolen or purchased a large number of stolen credentials. Those credentials are worth more individually if they are known to function. They can use any business on the Internet which sells anything and would tell someone "Sorry, can't sell you that because I couldn't charge your account/card/etc. Do you have another one?" to quickly winnow their set of credentials into a pile of ones which haven't been canceled yet and another pile. Another variation of this attack is their list is "literally just enumerate all the cards possible in a range and try to sift down to the cards that actually exist."
After sifting through to find the more valuable cards, they sell this onto another attacker at higher price of the mixed-working-and-not-working cards, or they pass it to their colleague who will attempt to hit the cards/creds for actual money.
Digital items are useful because people selling them have high margins and have lower defenses against fraud as a result. Cheap things, especially cheap things where they can pick their price, are useful because it is less likely to trigger the attention of the card holder or their bank. (This is one reason charities get abused very frequently, because they will often happily accept a $1 or lower donation, even one which is worth less than their lowest possible payment processing cost.) The bad guys don't want to be noticed because the real theft is in the future, by them or (more likely) by someone they sell this newly-more-valuable card information onto.
This hit the company I used to run back in the day, also on Paypal, and was quite frustrating. I solved it by adding a few heuristics to catch and giving a user matching those heuristics the product for free, with the usual message they got in case of a successful sale. This quickly spoils your website for the purpose they're trying to use it for, and the professional engineering team employed to abuse you experiences thirty seconds of confusion and regret before moving to the next site on their list. Back in the day, the bad guys were extremely bad at causing their browser instance to even try to look like a normal user in terms of e.g. pattern of data access prior to attempting to buy a thing.
Hope some of that is useful. Best of luck and skill. You can eventually pierce through to Paypal's attention here and they may have options available contingent on you being under card/credential testing attack, or they might not. I was not successful in doing so back in the day prior to solving the problem for myself.
Would also recommend building monitoring so you know this is happening in the future before the disputes roll in. Note that those disputes might be from them or from the legitimate users depending on exactly what credentials they have stolen, and in the case they are from legitimate users, you may not have caught all of the fraudulent charges yet. (Mentioning because you said "all of the charges" were disputed.) If I were you I'd try to cast a wider net and pre-emptively refund or review things in the wider net, both because the right thing to do and also because you may be able to head off more disputes later as e.g. people get their monthly statements.
To fix it, I had to proxy that unreliable SaaS software to implement CAPTCHAs and stronger bot detection. It was essentially a MITM-style proxy but for protection. It was fun to implement
So presumably yes
I’d look into fingerprinting (https://github.com/fingerprintjs/fingerprintjs), block by ASN if it makes sense for your business (does OVH really need access to my SaaS?), use an active disposable email checker and possibly flag risky orders for manual payment capture if at all possible.
You'll need to find some way to fingerprint to classify users into risk buckets and then treat them differently based on the bucket: blackhole, high friction verification, and likely safe are three reasonable buckets.
Cloudflare has tools that can help identify bots, much of this can be offloaded onto them.
It's also a bug in the paypal API that they're abusing, where the SDK doesn't differ between example.com and www.example.com. If webshops like yours get exploited and used for money laundering, they will mix transactions from those two subdomains, while leaving the www.example.com domain as it is. The support people at paypal are dumb enough to not take care about each case, and usually they mix transactions later also via other social media services that have microtransactions (e.g. tiktok or snapchat streams where you can gift away items).
The way paypal support's workflow works is that they have to nanually identify each and every transaction separately, meaning a human will be busy for weeks on end. Not kidding you. That's how the scammers keep winning with schemes like this. Usually there's also no way to escalate this, not even for business customers, at paypal, due to how their support offices are structured organizationally.
As a mitigation I'd recommend to block ASNs that are known hosters that do this, and double check your webshop version for known vulnerabilities and fixes.
If you don't use docker already, start to virtualize your webshop software now. I can't stress how important this is. Also double check any users and passwords you are using for the services, and the rest of the filesystem for indicators on the VPS. Disable SSH passwords and use only SSH key authentication on the VPS in case this hasn't been done already.
I'm writing this because usually this kind of scheme starts to happen after the server got pwned already, and after e.g. the ssh password bruteforce scanner was successful or after the web exploit / persistence exploit was successful.
If you need a starting point to block those botnet affiliated networks, I started both a firewall and scam database project that does exactly this:
[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/antispam
[2] https://github.com/tholian-network/firewall
- The Docker daemon runs as root: any user in the docker group effectively also has sudo (--privileged)
- Ports exposed by Docker punch through the firewall
- In general, you can break the security boundary towards root (not your user!) by mounting the wrong things, setting the wrong flags etc.
What Docker primarily gives you is a stupid (good!) solution for having a reproducible, re-settable environment. But containers (read: magic isolated box) are not really a good tool to reason about security in Linux imo.
If you are a beginner, instead make sure you don't run services as the sudo-capable/root user as a first step. Then, I would recommend you look into Systemd services: you can configure all the Linux sandboxing features Docker uses and more. This composes well with Podman, which gives you a reproducible environment (drop-in replacement for Docker) but contained to an unprivileged user.
It's unfortunately very common to install, for example, a project as the "ubuntu" user and also run it as the "ubuntu" user. But this arrangement effectively turns any kind of file-overwrite vulnerability into a remote-execution vulnerability.
Owning executables as root:root, perms 0755, and running as a separate unprivileged user, is a standard approach.
I've been using ufw-docker [1] to force ufw and docker to cooperate. Without it, Docker ports do actually get exposed to to the Internet. As far as I can tell, it does its job correctly. Is there another problem I am not aware of?
[1] https://github.com/chaifeng/ufw-docker
Docker is for organizing things for yourself, just like directories are. If you want actual isolation you have to take extra steps.
EDIT: and I feel like I should add those extra steps are exactly what most server software does automatically when it chroots itself. Again docker is really just for organizing things.
Docker containers don't have mount permissions by default.
Services have the following dependencies: static data files; configuration files; executable code/binaries; library dependencies.
In days of yonder, you'd need to download/install all of that ^ on each machine where "service A" needs to run. Developers would run and test "service A" on ubuntu 18.04. But production servers had to run ubuntu 16.04 because "service X" that also runs on the same server needs a library that has not been ported to 18.04 yet.
But "service A" needs a library that was never available on 16.04. Welcome to dependency hell!
Containers bundle all of those dependencies into one object that can be downloaded directly onto the host server, ready for the "service A" process to execute. Now it doesn't matter if production servers are running 16.04. Everything "service A" needs is stored inside the container blob (including some minimal ubuntu 18.04 stuff).
the magic that lets this happen -- containers re-use the host server's OS kernel. Running a new ubuntu 18.04 container does not start a new OS kernel running. the process for your container is just 'firewalled' off from all other processes using cgroups [0]. containers re-use the host's kernel, start a cgroup'd process which starts your container's services and processes (the 18.04 'OS' services and your binary/code/executable).
short/simpler version: containers share the core of the underlying operating system on the host server.
> If you want actual isolation you have to take extra steps.
unfortunately, this means containers share the core of the underlying operating system on the host server.
containers not being isolated from the host server OS can present a security risk as you can escape from the container and "do bad things to host server". [1]
In cases where that is a problem you mostly have two choices:
* use VMs instead (a completely isolated OS instance is started for each service, cannot interact with the host OS at all -- this uses a lot more memory/cpu)
* use rootless containers [2] (container processes are launched under a specific user namespace rather than kernel namespace -- escaping the container means you only get access to the user namespace)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cgroups
[1]: by default the docker daemon service and all the container processes it starts are running as root, which means escaping out of a container in a a default docker installation is as bad as giving someone root.
[2]: https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/rootless/
The idea is to make your app immutable and store all state in the DB. Then, with every deployment, you throw away the VM running the old version of your app and replace it with a new VM running the new version. If the VM running the old app somehow got compromised, the new VM will (hopefully) not be compromised anymore. In this regard, this approach is less vulnerable than just reusing the old VM.
Containers have essentially 3 advantages:
- Restart the containers after they got pwned, takes less than a second to get your business up and running again.
- Separation of concerns: database, reverse proxy, and web service run in separate containers to spread the risk, meaning that an attacker now has to successfully exploit X of the containers to have the same kind of capabilities.
- Updates in containers are much easier to deploy than on host systems (or VPSes).
Sorta: yes the container is immutable and can be restarted, but when it does, it has the same privs and creds to phone up the same DB again or mount the same filesystem again. I'd argue touching the data is always the problem you're concerned about. If you can get an exec in that container you can own its data.
For VMs, they did take off and essentially the entire cloud ecosystem runs on mostly VMs behind the scenes for VPS and similar hosting.
It's true though at it seems more popular for developers to reach for containers when they need to think about deployments, particularly docker containers. But VMs are still widely in use and deployed today.
(I helped build digitalocean from zero the pre-IPO, so I'm verrry rusty, this all might be nonsense/wrong think, and happy to be told as much! :))
And, either way, do you have a thought on whether you'd still prefer a docker approach?
I have some on-prem "private cloud"-style severs with proxmox, and just curious about thinking through this advice.
Edit: Im aware its not truly immutable (read only) but you can reset your environment very easy and patching also becomes easier.
On SSH password auth: its secure if you use a long, random, not reused elsewhere password for every user. But it is also very easy to not do these things. SSH certs are just more convenient imo.
For ssh, the problem does not lie within password auth itself, but with weak passwords. A good password is more secure than a keypair on a machine whose files you can't keep private.
A money launderer can use a marketplace by creating a seller account and buying from himself. Since he’s the one buying he doesn’t need to deliver anything but he gets the money from a legit source. Usually he would use a payment method as close to money as possible so that it leaves less traces. But in OPs case, the amounts are low so he needs too many transactions to get something valuable. And because of the disputes, he’s (probably) not getting the money (?).
It could be card testing: the fraudster has a bunch of cards and doesn’t know which is valid or canceled. The best way to find out is to test in a real site. So he’ll test out each of them and the ones that go through are good to use elsewhere. The thing is that it would be better for him not to dispute the transactions so the OP would take much longer to find out about the scheme and shut it down. It’s better to use low amount transactions in this case so it doesn’t use too much of the credit available for him to defraud and probably doesn’t warn the card owner.
Another option is doing it just to hurt the OP marketplace. If you have too many disputes the brands can fine you and if you don’t solve the problem they can turn your account off. I’ve seen it happen when a competitor was trying to hurt the e-commerce. It’s a low move and rare but it happens.
One thing that might help is to analyze the sellers too. In a money laundering and even in the other settings, it could be part of the scheme. Are they new accounts? Are their volume exploding out of nowhere? Etc
This only works (in my mental model), when you produce the product you're selling in-house – like a digital product. But lots of "reselling" type businesses try to use this scheme as well. Like a restaurant might ring up more meals than they served, or less to not pay taxes. But, is this not easily spotted when the food import(?) cost doesn't match the revenue?
Maybe I just answered my own question, if the business is able to cook the books both ways, but it would also limit how much they're able to launder. Or is the import/export balance rarely/never checked?
Especially if you stick with quarters instead of using game cards like most modern arcades. Since quarters would be recycled anyways (Taken from the games and restocked into the quarter machine), it makes it easy to just deposit the cash you want to launder as if it had been fed into the quarter machine.
More likly the above are selling something illegal though. Pay for the expensive hand car wash but get drugs instead with a cheap automatic wash - nobody will know the difference.
For higher valued goods they use horses. A saddle can go for $30,000, so you buy some $1000 saddles and sell them for $30,000 and $29,000 worth of something else.
It might look something like:
1) get funds via illegal activity (dirty funds) 2) spends funds at an ecommerce site (dirty funds) 3) secure a paypal refund WHICH GOES TO ANOTHER ACCOUNT (clean funds)
The PayPal vulnerability allows the money to move from a dirty chain to a clean one.
How it breaks the chain?
Account1 buys for 10k USD, requests refund, receives it?
Even if it went for some reason to account2 then there is still the chain, but why would it go to other?
The reason for this is stealthy botnets.
For a brief rundown, I'd suggest this article.
https://jan.wildeboer.net/2025/04/Web-is-Broken-Botnet-Part-...
I am aware of these types of botnets, how they work, and which companies are behind them. Hence the reason for adding my spam database to the initial comment, which focuses on exactly those, combined with the ebpf firewall module that analyzes and correlates repeated bad behaviors.
It's not a new technique btw, APT28/29 and others have been doing this for around 10 years now.
https://www.paypal.com/us/cshelp/article/what-are-payment-re...
The attacker may lose interest or move on to more fruitful targets if they find themselves blocked even temporarily. This is the "don't need to be faster than the bear" dynamic of online fraud: there are infinite targets and you don't need to perfectly shut out an attacker to make the ROI unappealing for them.
My thoughts on the scenario:
1. Chargebacks are not just a financial problem. There is no amount of money you can pay to regain the trust of your sellers (as it's a marketplace) or to change terms with your payment providers.
2. If the emails come from the same domain, can you block the domain? There are lots of throwaway domains, but it's effort for the attacker to switch them, too.
3. CAPTCHAs are increasingly ineffective between captcha solving services and multi-modal AI. I've heard in a few recent attacks that hCaptcha does a little better than Turnstile or reCAPTCHA.
4. Shadowbanning is good for wasting your attacker's time, which is really important to kill their ROI. You'll need to get your false positive rate low though to not piss off your actual good customers.
5. Your scenario (no API, browser required, no bot activity expected) is a really good fit for properly implemented device fingerprinting.
I'm the PM for Fraud & Security at Stytch and we do have a Device Fingerprinting product. It's harder to trial than the open-source ones, but the advantage is that attackers can't inspect the implementation to evade it.
Would you be interested in talking more? I'm happy to walk through your current controls and see if it makes sense to test Device Fingerprinting, shoot me an email at (first letter of my username) + (last four letters of my username) @ stytch.com .
Be willing to temporarily suspend your services in order to prevent the malicious behavior. Do the manual work to allow genuine customers to keep using your service, e.g: require manual account approval. You need to treat every one of these chargeback transactions as a risk to your businesses ability to operate, each that you allow to happen increases the risk of permanent damage to your business.
Reach out to your account manager at PayPal, this is not something that should be going via frontline support. You need to be talking to a person who knows and is responsible for your account. If you don’t have one, get one. If you can’t get one, look for anti payment fraud businesses that work with PayPal, they may be able to get a direct line to PayPal on your behalf.
For the future, if you’re dependent upon a service provider you should always have someone you can reach out to directly. If a provider isn’t willing to offer that, find a different provider. Financial services especially are very risk averse and will jettison your account if they get even a whiff of something untoward, whether you tried to prevent it or not. The cost of recovering from that will dwarf the cost of any drastic mitigation you take now. Losing your PayPal account is worse than turning off purchases for a few days.
This used to happen to us, eventually after haggling with PayPay support for over a year on who should bear the cost, we just shut down PayPal payments. Don’t have anything better to offer, sorry.
Our rule taking PayPal: Transfer EVERYTHING out of your PayPal account on a daily basis, do not let them hold your funds, they will block you from accessing it at some point. Minimize what they can touch.
Also don't all smaller amounts to be paid with PayPal. This prevents you from being abused as a source for verifying stolen accounts.
The only company I dealt with that came close to the same level of incompetency was Klarna. Klarna didn't at the time understand the concept of fraud, because they're Swedish and their system in Sweden MOSTLY prevented fraud at the time. Once people found away around that and Klarna expanded beyond Sweden, they gave up and attempted to stick the bill on us, despite their contracts clearly stated that they where responsible for collecting payments.
I transfer all funds out on a daily basis.
That only works until your business is successful. Once you reach enough transaction volume/dollars they will require you to float millions of dollars in your PayPal balance and not let you touch anything for 30-45 days after transactions.
Online marketplaces, multiparty sellers, credit card transactions, etc… are hard enough as it is
Don’t become dependent on a vendor who’s absolutely terrible to work with
So there's a large swath of the consumer population that views PayPal positively and will skip a purchase if there's no PayPal option.
In any case, this should be the primary responsibility of the payment service !! The fact it can so casually off load it to the merchants is just bizarre
3DS is 2FA and PayPal most definitely has it, it's just that they protect the customer regardless of 2FA.
With PayPal - beyond ownership of email address (which is already compromised), there's nothing else to validate against.
In Scandinavia there's also MobilePay, which is much much better, as it is also closely linked to real identities.
The nice thing about Paypal is I click the button and a window pops up that Firefox recognizes as coming from Paypal to autofill my login info, then Paypal confirms the payment info and gives the website just the payment info. With a credit card, even if you have a different payment processor with an icon next to it that says "secure", there's not actually any way for me to be sure at a glance that that isn't Stripe_Secure_Checkout_Confirmation.SVG and that you aren't just harvesting my credit card info, other than other contextual information on your website and your company's reputation as an actual company that does actual business in the real world.
Don't forget vipps, I think it also works in Poland now in addition to various nordic countries.
A few things that helped us: – Browser fingerprinting (FingerprintJS or even basic user agent + behavior tracking) – Logging full headers + TLS fingerprints — IPs rotate, but some other patterns leak through – Introduce small friction in the payment flow (e.g. lightweight CAPTCHA or JS challenge) – Look at timing patterns — automation tends to work in strict intervals
PayPal support is notoriously slow for anything that’s not cookie-cutter. Try emailing merchanttechsupport@paypal.com — they’ve been more useful in escalated cases.
This kind of thing is more common than you’d think, especially for platforms selling digital goods.
I added fingerprinting and rate-limiting and the problem seems to have gone away. They’re trying to test a large number of accounts / credit card numbers so the best strategy is to slow them down to the point where it’s no longer worth it for them at scale.
Very sophisticated LLM-enabled rented mafia bot net. They crafted attacks of various approaches as we turned up the heat.
In the end we refactored our entire authentication flow. We had a lot of Anon endpoints and ones that would validate card numbers etc from past misguided product and management decisions.
In the end we had to block a lot of legitimate traffic at times.
Reducing friction for users reduces friction for scaled bot attacks.
Besides this: You can not build a long term business that relies on PayPal [or Amazon.]
I would also try to attack the domains. Some strongly worded emails from a lawyer, report fraud at ICANN for the two domains.
- We have a no-questions-asked unlimited refund policy.
- I don't tolerate unverified PayPal buyer purchases. However, if someone tries to buy with one, I activate the subscription, and then contact the buyer via the e-mail/phone number they signed up with, confirm they're a real person, and then send them a PayPal invoice.
- Only subscriptions can be purchased.
- We've configured the flow when using PayPal to not tell the user if a transaction is declined to the maximum extent possible. I.e., the subscription still gets activated and then we call the user to arrange other payment options.
Then they demanded a return from PayPal. PayPal took the 50 then charged me a 20 dollar fee all without any interaction from me.
I tried to protest it through their appeals channel, but they decided I was in the wrong.
Needless to say I no longer have a PayPal account, life's too short for this Kafkaesque bullshit
It sounded from what you wrote that it will not affect your relationship with PayPal, because they are asking your sellers to contact them individually, and it's distributed across all of your sellers, so it won't affect their relationships either? Did I read that wrong?
Also, if you implement your own methods, do shadow-banning of bots that you identified. These attacks will stop if the time and effort the malicious actor has to invest outweigh the benefits, so the more time and effort you let them waste, the better. A good example are unsolvable and ridiculously captchas. That is obviously a double-edged sword - you need a good way of whitelisting known good actors, so the effect of false-positives on your customers is minimized.
Possibly something even that just wastes a little time and makes them know you're aware of the behaviour.
Also, have your attorney send a polite letter to Paypal's legal department.
I'd place good money on this being a competitor trying to sink your merchant account by racking up a lot of fraudulent transactions.
Open Banking is the long term solution here. There are countries with relatively advanced legislation on that manner, so depending where you operate you might have full flow in the background through banks API (the only thing you need to capture is end user email for account/ID verification).
Happy to give guidance to a fellow startup - I know you're unlikely in a position to be able to pay for a solution.
Digital goods, donations, ticketing, any sort of marketplace -- it doesn't matter your size, just having a merchant account they can transact against is enough motive for them.
- *Track anonymous user sessions*, even if you delete all anonymous sessions every 24 hours to prevent data accumulation, this will do wonders when it comes to tracking a user on their "approach" to your payment experience. It should be cheap-as-free to log some of these events so you can identify different populations of users based on how many "typical" events they skipped. With this, you are looking for users that skipped essential or common steps.
- *Get some sort of free device fingerprinting tool in place at or before your payments experience.* [https://github.com/thumbmarkjs/thumbmarkjs](https://github.com/thumbmarkjs/thumbmarkjs) ← this is a MIT fork of Fingerprint.js after they changed their license. It's a great starting point, and while these can be blocked or manipulated, it does a TON to raise the bar on would-be attackers. With this, you are looking for users with the same device hitting your payments experience over and over, and people who are blocking this script from running.
- *Some IP reputation vendors have a free tier API (e.g. IPQualityScore)* that might be helpful at the volumes you are working with, just be sure to cache lookups so you aren't making a bunch of API calls to get the reputation of the same IP over and over. With this, you are looking for IPs that either have a poor reputation or are classified as VPNs/Residential IP Proxies/Cloud Proxies.
- *Lastly, keep a running rate for your payment failure ratio over the last 20 + 60 minutes.* This lets you put logic in place that automatically puts more strict controls in place if your payment acceptance rate dips below 90% and transactions are above a certain minimum threshold - this should let you sleep a little easier knowing that your mitigations automatically shift to "battlestations" if an attack goes off while you are sleeping or out with your family.
*Being clear:* cookies, device fingerprints, and IPs are pretty easily manipulated by a motivated attacker - checking behavior across all three at the same time significantly raises the bar for a would-be attacker.
This should keep you out of the hottest water until you get to a size & scale of attack pressure where you might want to consider using my startup's platform to proactively classify and honeypot malicious user behavior.
We also started temporarily holding PayPal funds until we could manually verify transactions, preventing a lot of small test chargebacks.
Finally, contacting PayPal's Merchant Services team really helped us reduce fraud significantly.
If you are on a premium CDN, they are probably equipped and can provide security consulting. If not, you may want to switch vendor or buy a separated bot detection solution.
You'll probably need to block entire ASNs. I assume most of your legitimate customers aren't using VPNs or eg DigitalOcean droplets to access your site.
https://webagencyhero.com/cloudflare-waf-rules-v3/
In addition, you should start looking for alternatives to PayPal in case they decide to drop you.
I don't think I've seen vendors offer a choice of two different merchant accounts, but some do have multiple merchant accounts and select one or the other at time of billing; sometimes you can tell because it shows up a little different on the bill depending on the path, or more often because they send an announcement about trouble with billing and mention that it only affects some customers because they have two accounts.
did you look up the AS number of the IP addresses they're using?
We did not look up the AS number. Can you describe that we'd be looking for there? Based on how the address was changing, I assume they're using Tor or some kind of VPN that will obfuscate IP so I didn't spend much time looking at them.
You can't trust those services 100% but you can use them to turn up the level of turnstile/captcha/verification on those clients.
I'm somewhat concerned that you don't know what you'd be looking for (or to verify Tor) if you're running an ecommerce platform, fraud is an almost certain outcome for any store and merchant providers (Paypal, Stripe, Adyen, etc) want zero to do with helping you solve that (even if you're only embedding their Javascript!)
The user agents, can you post those?
You could also gather geolocation data from the ips and block commonalities.
Consider blocking all of Tor IPs, known data center ranges and the likes.
If they come from a consistent AS, you can block the AS. If they're using a proxy or VPN, you could try blocking those. If you don't expect to get traffic from hosting providers, you can block where `asn.type == 'hosting'`.
https://www.cloudflare.com/application-services/products/tur...
(no affiliation)
The PayPal option has always been an effective proxy to my credit card as a consumer.
I trust my credit card to Amazon or sellers that redirect to a known payment provider like Stripe, but that’s it.
As an example, Dominos online in my country recently removed PayPal and Apple Pay from their payment options. I now only pay cash on delivery because I simply don’t trust that they might get hacked at some point.
This is based on my 20+ years experience as a freelancer who worked on various e-commerce projects where every so often the client would ask me to implement dark pattern post sale “third party subscription” scams. Things like obscurely hidden checkboxes where the customer post sale agrees to an annual subscription to receive coupons and discounts from discount networks.
The implementation is nearly always taking the customer data including credit card information and shipping it off to the third party and they’d get a kickback.
The customer often didn’t notice the extra payment later on and by the time they did rarely charged it back.
I’d walk away every time I got asked to do such scummy things, but there of plenty of people who would.
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-10061167/am...
Known issue apparently: https://github.com/fingerprintjs/fingerprintjs/issues/1088
It detects bots, fake emails and proxies -- analyzing the network in realtime, no blocklists or IP reputation.
It's free during beta.
I’d love to hear what you end up doing.
Paypal is not a company that exists for its customers.
I can't respond to every comment right now because we're actively dealing with it. There were more attempts this morning. Some quick replies to some of the frequent comments:
* We're on a paid Cloudflare plan. We upgraded to the ~$2500 after this started and added a lot of filtering rules and interactive challenges to some key pages. Because purchases are either browser automation or humans, this has only been somewhat effective at filtering out bad traffic.
* IP checks show a mix of proxy/VPN and not. Blocking at the IP or ASN level won't get us very far.
* PayPal's Marketplace "platform" (it's a few APIs) processes orders through each of our sellers' accounts. As a result, we can't prevent purchases from unverified accounts because that has to be done by each seller.
* Moving off of PayPal isn't possible. For a marketplace platform in the US, the only other real option is Stripe Connect, but our domain has a lot of micro-transactions and Stripe's $2 per month per active user is a nonstarter. We experimented with Stripe and users (esp casual sellers) found their onboarding so intimidating that we lost signups. We would love other options, we have great concerns about PayPal as a longterm partner.
* Blocking the domains the purchases come from is not an option. They are recognizable names used by more legitimate users than illegitimate. We are adding extra scrutiny to these checkouts but we think it's possible they'll change tactics if they know we're onto that.
* Thank you for the fingerprint suggestions. We are going to try Fingerprint Pro.
* We've been gradually increasing friction via automated challenges and blocklists. We will increase this with more invasive Captchas, especially when aspects of the sale match criteria.
* We built an "Under Attack" mode that we can enable to completely disable key areas. We are prepared to temporarily shut down all sales if need be.
* We blocked prepaid credit cards from signing up for our subscriptions. This is a separate vector and we've had a few people try this over the past year. There was at least one person who did both the PayPal fraud and a signup scam + AI content. This should cut that off.
Again, thank you to everyone for the advice. We're monitoring this post closely.
Large EC here.
Wait until they ban your account and there again is nobody to talk to.
It's easy to say "don't use PayPal" but if you're going to say it, you need to do the hard part of suggesting a viable alternative for eCommerce that has as broad a reach and acceptance as PayPal. Stripe? Almost none of the outlets I do business with use it. Venmo? Same company as PayPal. Back to using credit card numbers? The more we spread those around online, the higher the chance they get stolen and used, probably in refund scams like the one OP describes.
People need an alternative with some degree of trust and most consumers, by my reckoning anyway, would prefer a single entity that is accepted everywhere. Right now, that's unfortunately PayPal.
Also not sure what and where business is but in Europe it's common to just use a proxy provider where credit card is just one of many options and you use a central gateway (similar to stripe)
You'd have to check your local options. At least one of my local banks offers something more advanced than PayPal. And there are several of these proxy providers in my country.
Edit:// if you just want low fee, fast and risk free transactions we all know there is only crypto
I honestly think it must be mostly sour grapes, since by far, cash and other traditional payment methods facilitate the vast, vast majority of crime and fraud, and cryptocurrency is the only universally accessible, trustless, (nearly) costless, instant, global system for the transfer of value between two parties.
It is by far a better system, even with its flaws. Which is why, yes, many criminals use it, just as they use cash. Because it works.
Its use case is still fraud and crime: when laundering money or fencing stolen goods, you expect the process to be difficult, dangerous and to have to pay a large fee. Crypto is a clear improvement on older criminal methods. It's not an improvement on credit cards.
Plenty of companies where you can sell and receive whatever currency you prefer. More or less instantly in case of some. Yes also to my EUR/CHF bank account. For Switzerland that's $1000 per day (per service) without any deep verification.
Some banks even offering "instant transfer" where you get a debit card and just pay with the crypto on your account. Swissquote to name one with all proper banking requirements and barely any fees.
Also from the point of a seller that has seen many kind of weird disputed and scams I am happy to not have any of these issues with crypto. This is an very obvious improvement over credit cards.
Not saying the world is fine, but blaming crypto (the most transparent payment method ever) is way to simple and far from our financial reality
Even to the point that the cost of maintaining other payment systems was less cost effective than just dropping them and focusing on crypto only. FWIW we are not a “crypto” business, our focus is kinodynamics.
Our market is global and we are small from a payment perspective in this context, so our case may be a bit of an outlier, but our lived experience does directly contradict your claim.
I agree that speculation and crime is a problem, but the speculation market in global commerce and currency dwarfs crypto, así does the criminal usage of cash, so it’s disingenuously myopic to frame those as a crypto-centric issue.
The relative difficulties of regulation because of the decentralized nature of crypto does make it a hotbed for schemes that wouldn’t be practical under local regulations, but I have a hard time getting riled up about that when we have giant state sponsored gambling industries nearly worldwide.
If you were to compare the impact on criminal activity if you eliminated cash vs eliminating crypto, I think it’s easy to see that eliminating cash would be much more detrimental to criminal activity.
In all, the arguments being made are not at all based on a rational examination of verifiable ground truths. They are almost to a fault emotionally based arguments with a near hysterical pitch woven into them from the start.
It seems like some people fear crypto. I don’t know why, but they do. On some level, they fear the threat it poses to the devil they know, perhaps. Maybe that is why they react the way they do.
I'd love an efficient and cheap option to move funds online - especially for micro payments too. But so far I haven't heard of any crypto option that actually stayed around long enough to prove these things.
Happy to be pointed in the right direction here.
I factor in 2.5% total costs for transaction frictions, historically that is a bit over 3x our actual average cost from payer to bank account, but it would easily cover the occasional loss of a day or two of sales in a catastrophe.
Pick a top 5 stablecoin that has a good reputation and at least 3 years, on a network with at least that, and settle your accounts daily, or whenever the accumulation represents a significant dent if lost.
The approximate aggregate risk-cost of major (top 10) stablecoins is somewhere south of .001% per day, and is better than the aggregate risk-cost of national fiat currencies, which unremarkably collapse or suffer catastrophic inflation and rebasing on a regular basis. There are frequently several undergoing this process at any given time.
This thinking is dangerous and stupid. Learn from history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday
This "stablecoin" garbage needs to die yesterday: a lot of people are going to lose their shirt when the first one blows up. Fixing exchange rates is folly, yet here we go again...
Please elaborate :)
International payment processing is quite expensive, both on a teansaction and on an administrative basis.
My worst case total risk exposure is approximately the same as the cost of 3 months of payment processing overhead, without counting fraudulent chargebacks and “we are going to freeze your account because we can” risks.
FWIW in the last 60 years I have lost way more money to fraud and theft dealing with banks and cash then I ever will using cryptocurrency. On a total, or a percentage basis. I see the risk profile, when properly managed, to be much, much lower using blockchain solutions.
Okay, yes: what you're describing is the actual utility of these things.
I think you underestimate how many people dealing in them are using them much less intelligently than you are.
They are being marketed in an extremely dishonest way, as a safe long term store of value. I regularly overhear normal people at my local bars talking about how they're "investing big in stablecoins" and it terrifies me.
What you are saying is a risk endemic to all fiat currencies, including stablecoins.
All symbolically represented forms of value quantization are subject to a failure of confidence. Cryptocurrencies are nothing new in this regard. All money is memetic in nature.
Fiat currencies have militaries. Your stablecoin doesn't.
Weird, people on the internet spewing BS? Who’d have thought?
The risk is obviously lower because you aren't parking money there. I could certainly see how you might come out ahead in fees for certain international transactions.
But your original claim was that the aggregate risk-cost of dealing in stablecoins is lower than real currencies, and that is absolutely preposterous: you aren't accounting for all the risks.
They may be great services, of course, being that I, a single consumer, am not a barometer for the success of a payment platform. But whoever they are, they're not being used by major retailers, distributors or manufacturers that I shop with both personally and professionally.
Worldpay/Stripe seem to be the most common providers for ecommerce.
More generally, payments are painful so finding a good provider is very, very important.
I don't know why they didn't show up early in your research, as they are among the most well known and easy to find. Ingrid is lesser known and mostly active in e-commerce in the european markets.
Ban your account and prevent you from accessing any funds in that account.
Your company should pivot into competing with PayPal. You've identified profound deficiencies in how they operate, know what type of services customers value, and have motive: someone is attacking your business and PayPal can't even comprehend that there is a problem, let alone protect you from it.
More than that, there are vast swaths of people that have horrendous horror stories about dealing with PayPal, having their accounts shutdown without explanation, being abused in the same or similar ways, and a wide variety of other concerns. There is a market for it. You just need to consider what made you go with PayPal Multiparty over whatever competition exists.
>We're struggling to find the motive or intended outcome by the attacker(s).
Unless you plan to sue, determining motive probably doesn't matter a whole lot. We could guess at different reasons, and even if we figured out a good one, it wouldn't change what is happening, just why it's happening. That's not much of a meaningful change.
One doesn't simply walk into mordor.
To enter this market, it requires that you first receive a national bank charter.
Post 2008 crisis, the laws have changed to eliminate competition from any new champion. There were many new requirements that can never be met over the long haul, and act as a ticking timebomb until it fails (through no fault of the person/group trying to start a bank.
At last read, the one that stuck out to me was it required a board of directors who could not receive payment or incentive related to the position, and where they would be personally liable for the majority of decision of the board.
No financial incentive, all the liability, and the decision is unmanageable in other people's hands. No one with a right mind will do that.
There's also the reasonability tests for success that need to be granted by the state or OCC as well. I hear these change all the time, and with the level of deficit spending these days and other fed shennanigan's its hard to find a reasonable person that will say any new contender will have a chance against a long-term state/fed fund/granted monopoly.
Each transaction will be unique, with a different device, different ASN, and different IP. If you find my post above, it links to an article which explains the whatfor and how this is going on.