## Customer Abuse

Customer abuse refers to behavior that exploits your business policies, leading to financial losses or operational strain. Stripe provides tools and strategies to help you prevent, detect, and mitigate various forms of customer abuse.

### Types of Customer Abuse

*   **Refund Abuse:** Customers exploit your refund policy by making excessive returns or falsely claiming non-receipt of goods.
*   **Resale Abuse:** Customers purchase products with the intent to resell them, often at a lower price, potentially violating terms of service or impacting your market.
*   **Trial Abuse:** Customers exploit free trial periods by using them without intending to subscribe or pay, often by using stolen or synthetic payment information.

### Preventing and Mitigating Customer Abuse

Stripe offers several approaches to address customer abuse:

*   **Stripe Radar:** This suite of tools provides advanced fraud detection and abuse prevention capabilities.
    *   **Customer Abuse Evaluation:** Detects multi-accounting and account sharing at signup and login, before payment is collected, by providing risk scores.
    *   **Free Trial Abuse Prevention:** Identifies customers likely to abuse free trials by evaluating the payment method provided at the start of a trial and blocking high-risk trials.
    *   **Pay-as-you-go Abuse Evaluation:** Identifies subscription customers at risk of not paying their next invoice, allowing for proactive measures like limiting usage or issuing early invoices.
    *   **Bot Abuse Prevention:** Detects payments likely made by automated scripts or bots, allowing you to enforce anti-bot policies.
*   **Clear and Transparent Policies:** Clearly communicate your refund, return, and cancellation policies. Ensure customers agree to these terms.
*   **Customer Service:** Maintain excellent customer service by responding promptly to issues and processing refunds or replacement orders quickly. This can significantly reduce the likelihood of disputes.
*   **Data Collection:** Collect comprehensive customer data to help identify suspicious patterns and verify customer identities.
*   **Verification Checks:** Utilize card verification checks (CVC, postal code, billing address) to validate payment information and identify potentially fraudulent transactions.

By implementing these strategies and leveraging Stripe's tools, you can effectively protect your business from the detrimental effects of customer abuse.