Identifying and reporting fraudulent orders
Fraudulent orders are not an everyday occurrence but they do happen. Oftentimes these orders are coming from a false account created with an order aggregator (i.e. ezcater). While they can be tough to identify at a first glance there are some red flags that can indicate an issue that requires further investigation.
Tips
Excessive tipping and tip modifications can be a clue that an order is fraudulent or illegitimate. If you see one of these instances, you should look further into the order to see if there are any other indications of an issue:
- Tips of more than 25% of the food subtotal are a red flag for suspicious activity.
- Multiple tip adjustments after acceptance or extreme increases in tip size without a proportionate increase in food subtotal
Vague, Missing, or Incorrect Delivery Information
- Deliveries to Shopping Centers without a suite or Contact should be researched for accuracy
- Orders going to large corporate locations or a Home will almost always contain delivery instructions or an onsite contact to facilitate the drop off
- vague instructions such as deliver to parking lot, or leave in lobby (with no contact) are an immediate cause for concern
- Delivery location should match google search results
- If the customer is listed as Home and a search of the address brings up a business (or if the customer is a business but the address is residential) this should be brought to the clients’ attention
Example- Incorrect Delivery Details
In the example below, the first red flag was the disproportionate tip (71% tip), but when we look closer, the delivery instructions say this order is going to a home (residential customer) but the address is for a shopping center.
Incorrect or False Completion Images
Delivery Photos of orders should always match the restaurant picked up from. In the example below, the restaurant that the order was to be retrieved from was Marco’s Pizza, but the packaging in the delivery pictures have a Clean Eatz logo on the box. A quick Google search of the restaurant shows that their packaging is red and green with the Marco’s logo, meaning that the attached image was either false or from a different order.
How To Handle an Order Suspected of Being Fraudulent
- Escalate Suspicious orders to Team Leads via a post in the #coordinator slack channel with appropriate tags.
- Reach out to the client to confirm the order is legitimate and request any missing information
- ex. @here ABC-123 can we please confirm this is an active legitimate order? customer updated the tip to $950 and food subtotal is $500
- ex. @here XYZ-456 can you please confirm this is a legitimate order? Customer is listed as home, but the provided address is a shopping center and there is no business name or suite number in the task.
- If the client confirms the order is legitimate and active, relay any missing information to the driver and update team leads in the original post
- If the order is fraudulent (not active/legitimate) and not marked successful
- Run the cancel command in slack
- Remove any additional orders accepted by that driver and mark them unavailable using the unavailable command for 10 days
- in the thread for the unavailable command response add a comment not to mark the driver available, “account under review”
- Submit a follow up ticket explaining the situation and the driver outcome
If a fraudulent order has already been completed follow steps above and then create a post in the payments and adjustments channel to remove the payment, citing false completion of the order.