TMS Chargeback Increase

We can absolutely block cards from countries in Merchant Services and I will have our Security team investigate this and reach out.

That's great news Chuck! We put in a ticket to specifically request that on 10/31 and have not been impressed with the response yet. The ticket # for this is: 669654. The ticket # for a separate request specifically to block those countries from TNEW as well which was requested in the original ticket and ignored is: 670278. 

This is a CRITICAL issue. Just today so far we've received 6 chargebacks totally almost $2000. Support has not helped. 

Hi Chuck, just curious where this stands of being able to block cards from countries in MS? Any update, as with this holiday season, we are seeing an increase of cards from foreign countries initiate chargebacks/fraud, etc

Hi Jessica Bonanno,

This is Sara Nemeth, Tessitura Merchant Services Manager, jumping in. We'd be happy to update your risk profile to our more aggressive profile, which includes blocking of specific countries where the incidence of fraudulent transactions is most commonly seen.

This more aggressive risk profile is best for members who have a higher risk of chargebacks and a higher tolerance for false positives when it will reduce the rate of chargebacks (i.e., it is more likely to correctly block a fraudulent transaction but it is also more likely to incorrectly block a legitimate transaction). 

If you'd like to be moved to the more aggressive risk profile, please feel free to submit a support ticket and we'll be happy to make that happen.

Thank you,
Sara

Hi Sara, thank you for the reply. Can you tell us the list of countries TMS would block that they consider high in fraudulent transactions? The two most recent instances of fraud we have had within the past 2 weeks are credit cards from Canada and Denmark.

Hi Jessica,

The list of countries blocked is monitored and maintained by our Security team and isn't publicly available to avoid any chance of it getting out to fraudsters who might then try to get around the rules. However, I can tell you that the countries you mentioned are not blocked.

I would definitely recommend putting in a Support ticket so the team can take a look at the specifics of each fraudulent transaction. If appropriate, the team will raise it to our Security team for further investigation and possible modification of the risk profiles based on the specifics of the transaction. In the ticket, please make sure to include the PSP Reference numbers from Essentials (copy and paste is best to avoid a typo if we have to re-type from a screen shot)

Thank you,
Sara

Thank you so much for sharing this.  Our organization is in the US, and we are using TMS and the chargebacks have really increased as well.  These purchases are from cards issued  in the US such as Kansas City, Illinois, South Carolina, and Colorado.  Yes, they have completed services and then charged us back after the performance dates as well.  Please advise who do I place a ticket with.

Something need to be done about this.  This spells FRAUD all the way.  Why and how can we stop this from happening?  Is there any way out of state purchases can be phone call orders only? At least we can monitor these purchases and let them know they have to pick up the tickets in person, knowing if I purchase from Colorado, I'm not coming to pick up tickets.

A support ticket have been placed #685361

I NEED HELP in DELAWARE!

Adding to this...

We are currently on WorldPay (starting our transition to TMS in the coming weeks). See this discussion thread gives me great concern for this cutover. We are currently already experiencing unprecedented chargebacks with WorldPay. We are almost to where we were at the end of last fiscal year with the amount of chargebacks we have had. We use AVS and have hosted payments active with WorldPay and we still lose almost every chargeback dispute (usually because either the mailing address we have didn't match the address on the card account (which makes us wonder what is the point of AVS if it isn't going to block transactions) or because the email address we have on the account doesn't match the email address on the card account which I don't think we can even AVS to and seems like a terrible thing to AVS to since an email address can be changed at any time on the card account).

This growing issues is costing us literal thousands of dollars a month right now. We need Tessitura to assist us in figuring out a way to combat this. It's clear this is a membership wide problem and I hope that Tessitura will focus more resources on helping us find a way to battle this problem.

Thanks Chuck and Team for listening to our concerns. We do appreciate it.

Chris

I also wanted to post here two dashboard .DASH files we use to try to combat brokers. We have two different ones but they are both based of this one. I have the dates looking forward 365 days and backward 7 days (to cover a run of a Broadway show). There is also an in-widget filter you can adjust to look for a specific amount of seats. This one is only looking for accounts with a total of 8 seats (either in one purchase or multiple purchases that equal 8 tickets. You can adjust that to look for an amount equal to or greater than that amount as well (which is the other dashboard). Remember to adjust data source to your instance of Seat and Tickets. You may have to adjust your price type category filter as well. Hopefully these help you all out. They have helped us out but as you can see it is a very manual process to then figure out what to do with these potential brokers. If you have any questions about the dashboards, don't hesitate to email me at christopherc@dmpa.org. I'm happy to help out if I can. PotentialBrokers-9andabove.dashPotentialBrokers-8ticketsonly.dash

We noticed an explosion of chargebacks and fraud alerts in the past two weeks or so as well.  We just asked Tessitura to raise our risk profile, so I'm hoping that helps (it took a while to get responses on this "not technically a system down, but absolutely critical" issue.  We're also running various reports to scan for odd numbers of tickets to a night, multiple orders right after the other, new accounts created with strange email addresses, etc.  

It's weird that it all seems to have happened after we switched to TMS this season - we changed no other business practices

Hi Kathleen,

It took more than three weeks for me to get a proper response from Tessitura, because this issue was also not considered critical enough in our case.
We're on TNEW and Windcave, and have also had a very dramatic uptick in disputes and fraudulent charges. The only thing we changed was enable a "lax" AVS where either the address or postal (aka zip) code must match to what's on the credit card's billing address. Other that, we haven't changed any other risk rules, because it seems that these buyers are buying one or two tickets in an order. Some are actual third-party sellers (which are legal here) but otherwise the disputes just keep coming in. 
And all of their email addresses are also abunchofrandomletters @ outlook.com