Fair enough, and about bloody time...

This is another reason why I am totally against such chargebacks. You are already totally defenseless and can do nothing to verify if you deal with reliable customer or scammer.
A lot of banks provide such services as SMS notification, so if something goes wrong (your card info is compromised), you will know about it within seconds. And there is no way that you miss such SMS within 48 hours. SMS notification is usually a paid service, but it protects you against any kind of money theft from card, so you can sleep peacefully and never worry about such things. By now, I think chargebacks are totally obsolete and they are mostly used to scam other people.

Actually, when my card got hacked, I got an immediate call from the bank ;)

In this case, the scammer was dumb as he/she ordered some car tuning parts and women lingerie for more than 1.000 euros to a postal adress which was different.

Nowadays, it can be tougher for banks to set up "alarms/warnings" in their system as a common strategy now is to do micro-transactions (like bundles and steam keys for example) because they're small amounts (5$ max) and don't need a postal adress. If the victim is using his/her card daily it would be harder to spot a few bucks difference among many transactions.

Fair enough. I'll change my statement to "you can be 99.9% sure that...". :)



Are you sure about that? So if GOG detect there's been a breach of ToS in the purchase of a game, they won't remove said game from the buyer's library?

how can they?

I bought some games and gifted them to friends, that's all they can see.

edit - and I see I misunderstand you... it is in the TOS that gOg can remove any part of the service from any user without reason and warning. However, removing a game from an account like outlined above will lead to a shitstorm gOg can not afford.

Thanks for the always interesting article links, catpower1980.

and people wonder why GOG doesnt sell its keys left right and centre to everyone...

People should buy a brain and stop paying for bootleg keys. Want to play a game without buying a license? Fucking pirate it.

Chargebacks exist for a reason. They're to protect people in cases when they initialize a purchase and the seller doesn't deliver.

I absolutely would. I don't use my phone daily. Checking whether I've been scammed every day is a huge pain in the ass. I mean, my neighbors own a car which costs way more than my card limit, and they aren't checking every damn day whether it's been stolen.

In fact, the only time I've been fraudulently charged without my knowledge is when someone exploited the SMS informing service coupled with payment verification -- no way to opt out -- by reissuing a SIM card. I wasn't able to recover the money. (I even enclosed a copy of my police report, to show I was acting in good faith.) These days I double- and triple-check the banks don't have my cell, and use ATM printouts for two-factor.

The other time I had to dispute a transaction, I'd bought goods online which weren't delivered. I emailed in a chargeback request with proof-of-purchase and links to Internet Archive's version of the scammer's site (since taken offline), and within two weeks I had my money back.

They can and do remove fraudulently purchased games.

The sad thing is that it is far worse than pirate sites. There ppl go on purpose to not spend a dime on a game. Sure, some relics from a decade ago would still mindlessly beat the "lost sale for every pirate" drum but this reselling frauds; these are indeed true lost sales. There you have a customer that wants to get something legit, is happy for the "sale", pays up and nobody involved in the games creation & publishment sees a dime of that.

Indeed they do, but the context of my post was about instances when it is not fraudulent.

And what's worse, it causes them (publishers/distributors/developers) to pay for the end result - fees and tarnished reps.

Yup - $30,000 is nothing to sneeze at. And we've seen a fair number of threads wherein the OP thought the problem was gOg's doing and in some cases it took a fair amount of effort to explain why it wasn't gOg at fault.

On the other hand, I don't fault people for seeking a better deal. This hobby can get expensive if you let it...