Donations + Charge Back Fees = Server Closed ?

Hello,

I hope im in the right corner here. Our server have been getting quite a few chargebacks on paypal from donators' credit card companies. Loosing a donation is not a big deal, you just return what you received. But.. You also have to pay 20$ for each chargeback, so a person made a total of ~14 donations, which were around of ~300$. We lost those cases, had to refund 100% of what he donated, plus we had to pay 14x20=280$. So instead of having ~300$ + donated, we ended of having -280$ from our pockets.

I mean come on.. Anyone could easily take down a server by making 100 donations with 1$ to a server, then tell credit card company that you did not authorise those donations and you want your money back. They'll do a chargeback, and the server would lose 2000$ for chargeback fees. I have contacted paypal about this, their copy/paste answers didn't help at all. They said there's no protection for donations, since intangible items or something.

How do other servers protect themselves? Is it possible to block credit/debit card donations? What to do?

 

How would one add money to their PayPal? via a bank account or card...

Either be a very rich man or use another website. Try and make them agree to a contract and send that to PayPal and ban the players who do the charge backs.

 

What do u mean by a contract? Explain more please.

 

I don't if this would work but just like YouTube, they ask for a digital signature when you are reporting someone for copyright infringement. So you could have a Terms & Conditions (i.e no chargebacks, etc...) and tell them that their signature will be digital and make them enter their legal full name. Make sure to keep this stored with their IP, etc...

 

The thing is that we did receive a few paypal disputes that didn't involve credit card companies, we lost them, but we didn't have to pay 20$ for each dispute. So I think, when donating with paypal, not directly with a credit card solves this. I might be wrong.. I'm very mad atm, can't really think :/

This problem should affect all servers sooner or later that receives donations, and we should all think of a good way to fight back scammers. One thing I know, is that TOS doesn't help you at all to win these cases, you will lose ALL of them, because of no protection by paypal since it's intangible items.

 

Instead of using donations with paypal, set up buycraft. This way none of this would happen.

If I'm wrong about that, someone please correct me.

 

Buycraft use paypal...

 

Yes, but with BuyCraft is makes it more "legal". It's hard for me to explain this over text.

 

No, buycraft doesn't help at all.

 

Paypal doesn't care if you use buycraft at all. The entire issue is because the donations/payments are virtual goods, which do not have any sort of shipping receipt for verification that they received their goods. Those are for disputed through paypal.
As for chargebacks, credit card companies don't care either, they just take the money back forcefully since it wasn't an "authorized purchase" which you have to prove otherwise in order to win the case.

 

Bump. Anyone have any suggestions?

Bump. None having these problems? :/

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/any-way-to-prevent-chargebacks.86448/