Key takeaway: Merchants fighting online shopping and return fraud now have fresh data on how normalized refund abuse has become among shoppers. Ravelin also warns that AI tools are making individual abuse attempts harder to catch at scale. Examples include fabricated delivery complaints and doctored product photos.
Fraud prevention platform Ravelin surveyed 6,282 online shoppers across the UK, Germany, and France. The survey found that 27% openly admit to abusing merchants’ refund policies — a group Ravelin is calling “refundjackers.”
Retail Technology Innovation Hub reported that 37% of UK shoppers admitted to past or planned refund abuse. That compares with 33% in France and 25% in Germany. Common tactics include falsely claiming an order never arrived and returning used items. Other abusers send back empty or dummy packages while keeping the original product. The research found that 98% of refund abuse attempts succeed.
Occasional abusers collect an average of £390 per claim. That rises to £491 for shoppers who abuse policies more than four times a year. Ravelin CEO Martin Sweeney said “this is no longer a fringe behaviour.” He added that “people aren’t sneaking around the edges of policy anymore.”
Ravelin also flags that AI is making refund policy abuse harder to detect at scale. The technology lets abusers automate customer service complaints and generate fake evidence images. Sweeney argued that blanket policy tightening penalizes honest customers. He recommended that merchants use their own purchase data to identify abuser patterns instead. British Retail Consortium policy advisor Chris Owen said the trend “is putting unnecessary financial drain on retailers.”
Why it matters: Refund policy abuse and eCommerce returns fraud are becoming more mainstream among online shoppers. AI is making individual cases of friendly fraud harder to spot. As a result, merchants will need pattern-based detection rather than across-the-board policy changes. That approach can curb return fraud without alienating legitimate customers.
Source: Retail Technology Innovation Hub, citing Ravelin research, “Ravelin flags the rise of the refundjacker as dishonesty becomes normalised among shoppers”