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3 Comments

My first screw-up

From time to time, malicious actors sign up for EmailEngine and try to pay for it. Most probably because EmailEngine can be used to send emails. Professional spammers immediately take out their stolen credit-card numbers to pay whenever they see anything that might allow them to send mail.

I try to block such payments by implementing heuristics to block suspicious customers from paying. And secondly, by reviewing all new payments. For example, a concrete factory company from Idaho signs up from an IP address in Tunisia with a credit card in Canada. In such a case, I usually cancel that subscription from Stripe, make a full refund, and block the account from signing up again.

All nice and clear until it isn't. I had a new payment from a customer that raised all the potential warning flags. As usual, I unsubscribed and refunded their account, but this time, it turned out to be a legit customer. And now, as they already made a payment, their bank blocks all new payments to my Stripe account.

So even though they did everything correctly and paid for the service and whatnot, they can't properly use it, as they still need an active subscription. They can't subscribe because their bank blocks the required payment. Without that subscription they can't create license keys for EmailEngine. And my licensing system is not versatile enough to allow exceptions. What a mess 😟

  1. 1

    The best way to go forward now would be to give the customer free access.

    1. 1

      Yeah, that's what I did in the end.

  2. 1

    Hey sorry to hear that, that can be incredibly frustrating. Have you considered fraud prevention services like https://www.ravelin.com/ (which specilises in prevent payment fraud) and / or https://castle.io/ (which specilises in account creation & takeover fraud) ??

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