By Synova Team
The instinct when refund fraud starts biting is to tighten the return policy for everyone. That's a mistake — it punishes your best customers and rarely stops the determined abuser. The better playbook is targeted: catch the specific patterns, and keep the evidence to defend each decision.
You can't manage what you haven't measured. Start with the two purest leaks: refunds issued without a completed return, and repeat-return customers whose refunds exceed half their lifetime spend. That number is usually bigger than people expect.
Bring the customer's history into the return queue so an expired-coverage or excluded-fault claim is denied automatically with a reason, and a thin-history case routes to a human instead of a guess.
For damage claims, a neutral request for photos of the product, packaging, and label filters a lot. Fingerprinting those photos catches the recycled-image trick, where the same "damage" photo appears on multiple claims.
When a refund is followed by a chargeback, or an "item not received" claim hits a signed delivery, your dispute response is only as good as the timeline you can produce: order, every carrier scan, refunds, and each decision. Assemble it once and reuse it.
Return Intelligence covers this end to end — the leakage audit, explainable scoring, wardrobing and chargeback double-dip detection, and one-click evidence packs. See Return Intelligence.
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