How to Prevent Chargebacks & Ticket Fraud

Chargebacks and ticket fraud lower your profits and create a customer service nightmare with unhappy attendees.

While you can’t control what other people do, you can take steps to prevent chargebacks and ticket fraud. We’ll cover strategies for dealing with scalpers and preventing chargebacks.

• How to Prevent Chargebacks
• How to Prevent Ticket Fraud

How to Prevent Chargebacks

Chargebacks occur when a credit cardholder disputes a charge on their card. The vendor responds with evidence that the charge is valid. Then the credit card company makes a decision on whether the chargeback is valid or not.

Credit card companies have a bias to decide in favor of their customer – the credit cardholder. Not only will you have to pay all the chargeback cases you lose, you’ll be charged a fee on top of that. Fees start at $7 per chargeback but can be much higher depending on the scenario.

Chargebacks don’t just eat into your revenue, they eat into your profits. You need to implement effective strategies to prevent them before they happen.

Stride Events offers many tools to help you prevent chargebacks:

• Purchase Blocking – Stop purchases from transacting with custom settings for your event.
• Suspicious Orders Report – Review dubious orders that our system flags.
• Ticket Limits – Set cart limits for each ticket order to prevent one person from buying your tickets in bulk.
• reCaptcha – Stop bots from making orders with reCaptcha verification.

With these tools, you can be more confident that legitimate attendees and fans are buying your tickets, sell more tickets directly to excited fans, and decrease your chargebacks.

How to Prevent Ticket Fraud & Scalping

Sometimes a chargeback happens because a couple shares the same credit card and didn’t communicate well about spending.

Other times, chargebacks come from scalpers who resell tickets at an inflated price and chargeback for the tickets they purchased. Yet others create fake tickets and sell them on popular ticket resale sites.

When the people with the scalped tickets come to your event, they’re either fake tickets or even double-sold tickets. Now you’re dealing with unhappy, defrauded people who wanted to come to your event.

If your tickets are already sold out, there’s not much you can do to remedy the situation, and none of it is your fault.

However, you can take steps to disincentivize ticket fraud with Stride Events:

• Dynamic QR Codes – Use digital tickets with a QR code that refreshes regularly to make it harder to create fake tickets.
• Authorized Resale Settings – Turn on resale permissions for your event to allow ticket holders to resell their tickets from your ticketing page. Set price floors and ceilings, your fee, and deadlines for sales.
• Delayed Delivery – Opt not to include tickets in confirmation emails and send them out within a certain time frame before the event to make it harder for scalpers to sell your tickets.
• Will Call Requirements – Adjust settings to require will call ticket pickup on certain orders and require identification for pick up to stop scalpers from selling your tickets.

With this variety of tools, you can approach ticket fraud and scalping with your preferred strategy – if you’d rather make the reselling work for you or if you want to stop it altogether.