BIG CHARGEBACK! what a shame!!!

I just discovered that i have a balance of about -150$ because of several chargebacks on my account.
does any of you have the same problem???
was there some credit card fraud like it happend in the past??

i really hope that my entire audio collection was not downloaded to be put into "free underground markets"... :-/

 

OMG!! I just checked
My account -300$++

 

Same here: -100$
And this is NOT the first post or thread about Chargebacks...
I think the Unity AssetStore people better start doing something about this, or devs will simply start posting their creations on other, more responsible, platforms!
Most Unity Assetstore publishers put a lot of effort in creating these assets, provide support, listen to feedback... And to see the fruit of your hard work ripped away from you is just... Well, I'm lost for words really!!!!

 

well, it's sad to know i'm not the only one!! :-/
it was a long time since the last chargebacks, so i was hoping the curse was stopped but evidently it's not...
let's see if there is some answer to understand what's happened!

 

waiting for the tsunami to hit me... fingers crossed it's not getting too bad...

 

Did the people paid via paypal or cc via assetstore directly?

 

Me to -90$

 

Looks like piracy is actively harming developers. Read this, pirates.
To clarify, a legit refund given by the author won't be subject to chargebacks, right? Perhaps unity can opt in to a holding scheme, where you're not paid until a following month.

 

Chargebacks can happen up to 3 months after a fraudulent purchase...

 

@hippocoder They already have a holding pattern of half a month, you are paid for all December purchases on or around January 15th. There really is no seller protection from these chargebacks. It also hurts that Unity seems to do all these adjustments in bulk. There are a LOT of people experiencing chargeback pain today (much more volume than normal it seems) as Unity processes all this stuff into their system en masse. It's quite disheartening really.

 

Well, at any rate, when 1/3 of your sales are fraudulent and piracy, and are then subject to Chargebacks, that does not bode well for the future of the Unity Assetstore... This just means this is the perfect way to steal assets and get away with it. As I said, unless this is fixed in one way or another, publishers will be encouraged to move to another online store... And there are a variety to choose from!

 

The chargeback is for the full purchase price which you only get 70% of to begin with. Unity also loses their 30%. Still, they can absorb the loss... while many asset authors find that a more bitter pill to swallow.

 

I got chargebacks too. I have my own online store, and I'm considering pulling all of my 60 assets out of Unity's asset store. You better work this out, Unity !!

 

I don't think your loss harms Unity because there will always be those which fill the void.

But a more pressing concern is the chargeback system, better measures need to be taken because it's the right thing to do, rather than reacting to people threatening to leave.

 

nobody cares if a publishers leaves or not... Unity can handle that, plus there will be a bunch of other publishers willing to get on board. Further more, you won't get that many sales off of your own online store, customers like to have all their stuff in one spot, here in that case unity... Makes it easier to get all you need, see your invoices etc... no need to back up your stuff, it's in the unity cloud.
Good luck if you think you can do better with your own store.

 

I have my own store. Here is how my sales percentages breakdown...

My Store: 0.5%
Asset store: 99.95%

It can be argued that without the product on the asset store that more would purchase from your website. This is true, I've experienced it when I had a product on my store that wasnt yet approved fro the asset store. However the amount of eyes that the asset store drives to your product are much greater than the chance of someone just finding your product on your website, so the sales would not be equal by any means.

 

I don't purchase assets outside the Unity store :/

 

Unity should give extra exposure to the assets of people victim of scams, so they can refill the account!

 

me neither, unity store assures me the asset will be available even if the author deprecated it
and protects the buyers under the asset store EULA.

 

I'm not talking about selling directly via an obscure difficult to find website... There are many other "portals" and online stores similar to the Unity Assetstore, so it's just a question of math really... If out of 2 sales, 1 gets a chargeback systematically, this means that 1 out of 2 sales are pretty much "stolen"... Bottom line, if I want to protect my Asset and my work, I should move to another store.

Don't underestimate the free market, where there is a demand, there will be an offer, and if publishers grow dissatisfied with the Unity Assetstore, and therefore create a DEMAND for a new, more respectful online store, it will happen.

 

I'm on some other stores and so are other publishers. and I guess all of them would agree that the Asset Store if by light years far the one that provides the greatest income. Chargebacks always happens, and unity usually handles that by bulk. So it's a little tsunami coming right in your face every 3 to 6 months.... Have to agree though that it's by far the biggest amount of chargebacks I've witnessed. So far so good on my end, but I'm sure it'snot over and they haven't processed all the chargebacks for all the publishers.

 

I had 3 chargebacks today as well.

Its true that I never experienced it in another marketplaces.
And of course it is not nice to see how my earnings became smaller. But I am always have in mind that I never had so many sales on any other marketplaces, never.

I am sure that Unity Store is very attractive field for many kinds of scams. And it will be very nice to find remedy from these chargebacks.

In my opinion credit companies must take their responsibility for this. Peoples pay to сredit сompanies to be secured from scams.

 

@rosor yes, you're right.. I'm also on other stores, I get much less sales, but nevertheless, competition and the market CAN change that fact... At a certain point in time, Myspace was the King of social networks, look where it is now...

Things can always change unpredictably, especially in the field of tech and programming. There are a few "safe" bets, but for the rest, history teaches us that whenever a dominant player thought it had "won over" the market and became complacent, that's when things started to change. I'm thinking of Microsoft who had a massive advantage over competitors at the time of Windows XP in terms of market shares, and then came the tablet, Android, the iPhone... You know the story.
Unity is good, and so is the Assetstore save for a few things like this Chargeback nonsense, but sometimes, that's all it takes!

 

It might not be piracy, it could be because some have over extended themselves at Christmas time. They do not just have to buy presents for family members, but there are Unity sales temping them too. Perhaps shift your sales to another time of the year?

 

How do you define getting something without paying for it? Whether it's with malicious intent from the beginning, or buyer's remorse that they don't want to live up to, the end effect is the same.

 

probably some website leaked stolen credit cards, some guys went rampage on asset store and purchased everything before being caught using this stolen cards, there is no way Unity know early that it is a stolen cards, and also no way they keep stolen money.

 

My January net sales revenue: $-599
I definitely in a debt now. XD

I've experienced chargebacks at some marketplaces, but this is simply the worst.
It's just my 4th month at Unity asset store, and I've lost something about $1000 from chargebacks.

 

What are chargebacks?

 

When a credit card is stolen, and the thief purchases goods with the card, the original owner of the card is not responsible to pay. Instead, the Credit Card company "charges back" the funds to the seller, as they have assumed the risk of selling.
This makes the seller disappointed of course, but in reality they haven't lost anything -- because the thief wasn't going to buy to begin with. Of course it plays havoc with their accounting and finances, but they haven't actually lost anything.

Note: I'm not advocating anything here, nor saying this is victimless. It's painful, and the thief should be strung up, of course.

 

That is one view Jaimi. On the other hand someone who has a stolen credit card number can buy quite a range of goods with it. Most stolen cards go to buying something that can be resold, like a smartphone or a lego set. However, an asset that was bought with a stolen card can't be resold, so it has to be a free download of an asst that the buyer personally wants to use.

Stolen cc data isn't the only thing that can produce a chargeback. A chargeback can also happen if someone uses their own card and then disputes the charge later. This gives them a free download without paying. The only case in which no actual harm is done is those in which the purchase was made by mistake (like if some 6 year old got ahold of a cc and went wild on the asset store). In all other cases a chargeback means the loss of a legitimate sale.

 

Thanks for explaining. I saw someone mention it was different to a refund so I was just curious about it...

Sounds like maybe if a whole bunch of folks are having trouble this month in particular, maybe the same "thief" is doing the rounds on the Asset Store?

 

I would also dispute that the seller hasn't lost anything. They certainly have lost. In fact the seller seems to be the only party who has lost something.

Since credit cards allow chargebacks anywhere up to 6+ months after the fact, the seller can lose a lot of money that has already been paid out and used for other things. There are a number of sellers whose sales balance has now gone into the negative, some of them far into the negative. This will prevent some from having any sort of income from the asset store this month.

This would not be as much of a problem if chargebacks were handled within a more reasonable timeframe... say a 1-month cutoff. This would prevent money from being allocated elsewhere on the seller side, and also prevent a massive dump of months-worth of chargebacks from Unity's side which is what is happening in this case.

 

Or we ditch the credit card system and move to Bitcoin, since you either have them or you don't and there's no chargebacks.

 

One question: will the negative amount be subtracted from January payoff!? So that the "debt" with unity will be cleared if December income is higher than January cashback??

 

I have worked with big financial organisations and talked with their security people.

When an exploit is discovered it is generally rapidly pursued by organised crime until the hole is shut down. Many millions of dollars can be stolen in short amounts of time.

When big specialised money organisations have problems with this, its unreasonable and naive to expect Unity to be able to magically stop it.

Its not a simple problem to solve, and is an unfortunate and sad fact of digital life.

 

We've currently been experiencing a much higher number of chargebacks than normal through the Asset Store.

For those of you unfamiliar with how it works, a chargeback is usually triggered by the bank when they detect a fraudulent purchase or requested by someone to their bank claiming it's fraudulent.

To put it in context we generally only get a few of these a month, when this happens we block their account prevent further purchases.

We're currently investigating the cause of this so that we can put a stop to it as soon as possible, we're taking this incredibly seriously and apologies for the inconvenience caused.

 

This might be outside of what you can do due to payment gateways, but it's likely the same stolen card being used repeatedly, so the system should flag frequent uses of the same card for different user accounts. But that's probably hard to manage, and in the hands of Visa/MC/Teller etc. :/

 

Question, does using Paypal or something similar help? Would there be a layer of protection there or would it have the same exact effect? Pardon my ignorance but just wondering.

 

I understand the issue, of course, but I have a few questions.
Are these purchases made by the same credit card? It seems highly unlikely that a "criminal organisation" got their hands on 100 credit cards and stormed the Assetstore... I don't really see the point...
If it's purchases from one or two different credit cards, wouldn't it be possible to have a "safety" feature whereby sales are blocked using a certain card if they deviate from a "standard" user behaviour? I mean, if someone attempts to buy 100 assets in an hour with the same card, I think it's highly atypical and the probability of it being a fraud is extremely high.

I would really hope that Unity puts in place some kind of safety feature to avoid Chargebacks altogether.
I'm not saying you can of course gaze into a crystal ball and have the number of stolen credit cards in advance, but at least have a system in place to detect unusual behaviour using the same card, the same IP or the same account for massive purchases...

 

I just asked support and it seems that a customer can talk to paypal to arrange a chargeback, so not totally protected there.

We're still looking into what happened, all we know right now is that this is not usual user behaviour so we're investigating.

Unfortunately chargebacks are something completely out of our control so we can't completely stop them happening but we're looking into minimising them in the future.

 

This is why I contact a lot of you and ask you to sell threw your own private store as well as the asset store. I've been burnt so many times that after GAIA came out I haven't bought another thing unless the author sells it privately on their own website. I've got about 14 assets that are depreciated, can't use them, can't do anything with it, but can't get my money back either. I've also seen a thread on a popular unity piracy site that explains how easy it is to get whatever you want off the asset store and then have the bank do a charge back. If Unity won't protect you then you guys need to start doing your own thing and keep that 30% to yourselves. Just my two cents though.

 

I don't think that's atypical. When I was working on a research grant I had to declare all the assets that I might need for that grant project in advance and then purchase them all at the same time under a single invoice.

It's actually really easy to purchase 100 stolen cc numbers off the black market. A stolen number typically sells for about 20 cents each. Using that credit card info without going to jail is much harder.

Things that have no resale value, like assets from the asset store, are not typical targets for stolen cc numbers.

Personally, I suspect that this entire charge-back incident is the work of a single person who purchased a bunch of stolen numbers and bought every asset they could think of. Probably some kid in a garage working on his own indie game. These things are easy to trace, so the kid will probably be arrested soon and that will be the end of it.

 

Yes, I understand your point. There may be some cases where someone would indeed purchase a large number of assets in bulk for a project, but how frequent do you think it is?
Perhaps Unity can introduce a "second layer" of security where, if you are indeed buying assets in bulk, you should send in some kind of proof that it is for a project, or that you are the rightful owner of the credit card.

And besides, again, if Unity is keeping track of purchase patterns, then surely fraud must have a different pattern then buying for a "project". For instance, in the case of fraud, you probably have a very short delay between the time of registration of the user, and his purchasing frenzy, whereas someone working on a project will probably take their time and make a "wishlist", building it progressively rather than registering and the minute after, purchasing anything he/she can find...

 

Agreed.

I found this book was a good example of how rapidly it can happen.

Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground
ISBN: 978-0307588692

 

i have a chargeback for 35 bucks, I say ok, its a money that is returned and thats all. But later I sale another asset by 40 bucks and the sales says I got only 5 bucks. 3.5 really WHY THEY DISCOUNT THE CHARGEBACK OF MY VALID SALES? AHHHHH

 

I believe that a paypal user can only arrange a chargeback via paypal (through a dispute I believe) when it comes to physical goods, not digital ones. I might be wrong though.

 

you can open a dispute on PayPal even if it's digital goods. §usually the one disputing might not get his point across if the seller can provide enough info about the fact that the product sold is the same as how it's advertised.

 

And again today This is quite disturbing. I was robbed again...

 

I issued once a chargeback. It took me 4 weeks and a threat to contact EU authorities. I purchased a asset (multiplayer FPS) which contained stolen IP, stolen Code. I purchased the asset and 2 weeks later a forum thread came up regarding the asset. Asset was deleted. I contacted unity asset store for a charge back since I cant use the asset in any game regarding the stolen code and stuff. They first denied to payback. Then I contacted paypal and opened a dispute. after 4 weeks and a few messages exchange where I clearly showed that they act against EU law, they paid me back the full amount of the asset. So, its not EASY to get paypal money back. I am not sure, which method the thiefs used on you?

 

Chargebacks are only quick if the payments are fraudulent.