Money Minute: How We Fight Fraud So You Don’t Have To
We’ve learned a lot over past few years, creating and running GameWisp. One thing that we didn’t anticipate, however, was the high amount of fraud, scamming, and trolling that we would deal with as a part of processing payments for streamers. Many creators don’t see any of this during their entire career. Some streamers encounter it occasionally.
We deal with it nearly every day.
When you are processing tens of thousands of transactions every week in the streaming industry, chargebacks, trolling, and other forms of fraud are a daily occurrence. We’d prefer to believe that every subscriber who connects with creators through GameWisp is honest, is putting their hard-earned money on the table because they want to support a streamer they love. But, this is the internet. And, on the internet, sometimes, people lie.
Scammers try to test out stolen credit cards, or they subscribe to a streamer to build hype on stream, only to charge back a week later. They try to get benefits for free by telling us they never received them, or they chargeback just because they forgot to cancel their subscription before it renewed.
No one really expects this to happen to them, at first, but we see it, every day, and we’ve learned what to watch out for. That’s made us much more prepared to handle the resultant disputes properly, respectfully, and effectively.
Our goal is to make GameWisp the safest place for streamers to make money on the Internet. We employ all manner of IP tracking, record collection, email verification, and machine learning fraud detection technologies. We place potentially risky transactions into review, in an effort to prevent streamers from ever reaching a negative balance due to chargebacks.
Still, we know, the entire process can be disconcerting, particularly from the side of the creator. Nobody wants to hear that the payment promised them by one of their fans has to be temporarily placed on hold or place in reviewed, just in case. Nobody wants to be told that what they thought was a dedicated, passionate viewer might instead be a fraudster, or a troll. We don’t want to keep you from seeing the money you’ve earned. We know it can hurt.
But, chargebacks hurt more. Trolls, fraudulant payments, improper refund requests, these things, if I may be blunt, suck, a lot more than having to wait up to a month to be sure a payment is real. Anyone who’s experienced it in the past knows, finding out money you assumed was a legitimate payment from a fan is, instead, so much hot air, can be infinitely deflating, and do real damage to your personal budgeting.
That’s what we’re fighting to prevent, when we place payments into review. We don’t like delaying your collection of your earnings, but we’re thrilled to be able to deal with scammers so that you don’t have to.
We have tools that give us deep insights into subscribers. We track IP addresses and match them to billing addresses, monitor multiple account creations by a single user, verify email addresses, use machine learning to identify users with suspicious behavior. In some cases we even match public records to locations of subscribers to refute unauthorized use claims.
All these things combine to create a safer, more reliable place for creators to make money, engage their fans, and all-together make their stream stronger, while minimizing the threat that internet trolls and fraudsters pose to the health of your community. They also, sometimes, lead to delays when it comes to seeing that money you’ve rightfully earned, and for that we’re sorry. We’re constantly getting better, and, in the future, those delays should grow shorter as we improve our fraudster-detection. We feel this is still light-years ahead of the alternative, a scenario filled with frustration, for you, the creator, and us, as we deal with all the dishonest nonsense of which the internet is capable.
Safety and speed don’t always go together, unfortunately, and we know that nobody likes to wait for what’s rightfully theirs. But, we want to be sure that, when you see money in your GameWisp account, it’s really and truly there, no ifs ands or buts. We think that’s important, and we hope you agree.
