Fraudulent returns: the underground market that sells methods to scam retailers and consumers

A few years ago, the return of a product used to be seen as a simple part of the customer service: a policy designed to give the buyer confidence and facilitate the purchase experience. Today the same option has become an exploitable vein by criminals who have transformed the abuse of repayments into an organized business. It is no longer a question of taking advantage of an opportunity policy, but of buying and selling methods to do so., packaged as if they were courses or digital services.

Researchers tracking fraud communities have discovered an underground market where they are offered from detailed guides to operators who make the returns on behalf of the client. This evidence, collected and analyzed by firms specialized in threat intelligence, shows how knowledge of customer care processes and payment dispute systems has become the main tool of scammers, without the need to resort to malware or complex technical attacks. You can see some of the work on this phenomenon on the Flare.

In practice, abuse takes many forms. Some claim that a shipment never arrived and gets the refund by keeping the product, who returns an empty box or with a cheap substitute, who replaces an item with something of lower value, or even who disputes charges directly with the bank to force a return. There are also models in which someone buys a guide and another person runs the actions by a commission, which facilitates the scalability of these operations.

The available data indicate that the phenomenon already has a commercial scale. An analysis of publications in private forums and channels detected thousands of ads that are repeated in multiple communities to reach more buyers; many guides are sold by modest figures ranging from tens to a few hundred dollars, which reduces the entry barrier and attracts both beginners and experienced operators. Flare and other firms offer reports and follow-up services for organizations that want to better understand this landscape.

The cost to trade is significant. In 2024, according to retail industry figures, business-run returns reached hundreds of billions of dollars, with a portion attributed to fraudulent returns representing a sum of several billion in the United States alone. These numbers are reflected in sectoral reports such as National Retail Federation, and economic studies also indicate that fraud has indirect effects amplified by operational and logistical costs; investigations into the actual cost of fraud discuss ratios that show that for every dollar stolen total losses for a company can be multiplied. A study on the economic impact of fraud is available in the research of LexisNexis Risk.

Behind this dynamic is a real tension: consumers expect facilities such as free returns and simple processes to solve incidences, and that priority for an experience without friction is exactly what the fraudsters exploit. Research in the e-commerce sector, such as Narvar they show that comprehensive return policies influence the loyalty and choice of the point of purchase, which complicates retailers to tighten controls without penalizing the legitimate customer.

The most mentioned brands in clandestine conversations are often those with high volumes of transactions and customer-oriented policies: large trading platforms, payment processors, marketers and electronic and retail chains. This profile makes it easier for fraudulent returns to go unnoticed between legitimate traffic and for the potential benefit to be greater when it comes to high-value items.

It is important to stress that, unlike other cybercrimes that require advanced technical skills, here the social engineering and the knowledge of the internal functioning of the processes of return and dispute are paramount. This makes the issue a problem of business logic as well as computer security: it is not enough to protect platforms against technical attacks if operating procedures can be manipulated.

In the face of this challenge, companies must take an integrated look. It is not enough to improve technology; it is also necessary to invest in threat intelligence that monitors the forums where these techniques are sold, to share learning among industry actors and to train customer care teams to detect atypical patterns without sacrificing the honest buyer's experience. Tools and services specialized in criminal market monitoring can help to detect emerging trends and adapt rules and processes before losses accumulate. Flare, among others, offers solutions aimed at this type of monitoring in the underground ecosystem.

In addition, reviewing internal return management flows to incorporate controls that do not introduce unnecessary friction, establishing more robust verification mechanisms in high-risk cases and analysing the traceability of packages and reception tests can reduce the operating area. All this must be accompanied by a policy of information exchange between shops and payment providers to identify repetitive patterns of abuse on time.

Finally, it should be recalled that the marketing of knowledge for crime has social effects: those who buy these guides often enter networks that expose them to increasingly harmful practices, and the victims are not only the shops, but also the consumer who ends up bearing added costs. Combating the problem requires, in addition to technological and operational measures, a coordinated response, including regulation, sanctions and awareness-raising programmes.

The evolution of return fraud is a reminder that security is no longer just blocking technical intrusions, but also protecting the integrity of business processes. For those who manage sales and payment platforms, the recommendation is clear:In order to deepen the findings and services that analyse these markets, it is appropriate to consult the specialized threat intelligence resources and the sectoral reports referred to in this article, such as those of the Flare, NRF and studies on the actual cost of fraud published by entities such as LexisNexis Risk.