I recently received a chargeback notification from our payment gateway for an order that was placed and delivered in December during XMas. It was for $566.71 to an a**hole named (supposedly) Steve Marcil in Quebec. After some research, it looks like it was a completely fraudulent order - the payee was in Nova Scotia but the IP address is from Quebec, the phone number no longer works (if it did at all) and the customer used a free e-mail address and never registered an account.
All in all? A complete fraud. So not only am I out of the cost of the chargeback, I've also paid for XPressPost shipping for the order as per the order request of $30 and I'll be charged a $10 'administrative' fee for the Chrageback. $600 completely out of pocket , never mind the $300 or so in products that was shipped.
Grrr.... at this point I'm thinking I might as well burn another few thousand, hire a Private Investigator to locate this idiot and then fly over and break his kneecaps.
Sadly, that's probably more fantasy than reality. Other than a police report, there's not much else I can do other than institute even tighter anti-fraud policies in-house. It'll cause delays for actual customers, but I can't afford to eat too many of these kind of charges without going out of business.