IAP refunds

Our app is based around a consumable IAP, which provides a personalised service to customers. Each IAP purchased requires a work by our staff in terms of time and therefore financial investment.


We got quite a shock today to find 63 IAP refunds. Usually, there's one every few weeks but but nothing near this scale.


I am trying to understand if there are any protections in place for developers. Documentation does not mention any way one could make a link between refunds and users/purchases to be able to stop providing services to abusers.


Does Apple at least limit the refunds to 1 set of refunds per customer or are people left to abuse the system?

Replies

We're having the same issue with our game. 60 refunds in one day on our most expensive purchase, totally a lost of around $6,000 USD. This was started when a clan of players realized they can refund the iAP, receive their rewards in game, and not spend a cent. They would repeatedly create new accounts when the threshold of suspicious refunding was reached. We contacted Developer support, but since Apple's Fraud protection team doesn't have a dedicated contact, we were not able to resolve our issue. Every few days when there is an event running, we seem to get a batch of refund. We are still unfortunately trying to figure out how to stop the abusers.


Unlike real world products, when a iAP is refunded, the user still can keep the product.

Did anyone figure this out? I ended up validatingReceipt and Transaction in the updatedTransactions() method. In order to deal with refunds, I was thiking to validateReceipt in didFinishLaunchingWithOptions and undo any purchases. Though this risks alot of things and can only be used when there is an internet connection.


Any ideas?

I had the same issue. Apple refunded over 100 IAP on September 8th and 9th and I lost thousands of dollars. Prior to this, I had less than 1 refund per month on average.


I contacted Apple by phone and email multiple times because I think there must be an issue. They kept telling me that they were looking into it and that it was taking a long time to investigate. Now it’s been more than 3 months and they don’t answer my emails since early December.

10 months later I am no further with this. Apple provides 14 day no questions asked refunds to customers in the EU.


Is there any formal guidance on how to manage this? Or at least reassurance from Apple that they do not allow customers to repeatedly request refunds for the same product?

I just encountered refund of USD21K in June16, and USD7K in May16, is there anyone can help to advise?


I'd like to know if is possible to know what Apple-ID or User did the charge-back, at least we can ban their ID for abusing this.


Take the following behavior of an

User
. (
you
in this case means the app developer):
  1. User makes a $99 in-app purchase and receive YYY 'Gold Coins';
  2. User buys in-app stuff using the 'Gold Coins' (Potion, cards, whatever);
  3. User receives the items and requests a charge-back;
  4. Apple accepts the request and gives user the $99 back;
  5. Apple informs you that you received a charge-back, but does not specify anything related to user like device's UDID, account or anything;
  6. Without user info, you can't remove the in-game items user got through the purchased coins;
  7. User shares this behavior with other users;
  8. Everyone does the same;


****, where can i get someone from Apple to answer this?

You don't need to know their Apple ID or ban them.


I think the accepted method would be to:

- Verify receipt, probably sometime after app launch.

- Check the items within the receipt against each of your products/features/etc

- If its not in the receipt, the user didn't buy it, just disable/remove products/features/etc

Were you able to implement this periodic receipt validation to be able to undo the effect of the purchases and confirm that it has worked in recognizing refunds?

Could you possibly post code used?


Thanks!!

With one possible exception this will force the user to log into their iTunes Accoont on each launch - a bad user experience for 99% of your users to 'catch' 1%. The one possible exception is auto-renewables which might still have a "latest_receipt" field.

HI

Would you please guide me that how can check customer's refund transaction on App Store?

Is there any news on this?