The end of an era - G2A Pay

Hi all,

As a person in the market i believe every marketeer should be in the knowledge regarding updates their payment processors are going to make.

I made a post about the latest big G2A Pay update, where they stopped accepting Paypal payments via their own platform and instead required merchants to link their own Paypal account to their G2A account. G2A in return only handles as a "pass-through" for the Paypal payments instead of being the actual recipient of the payments as was originally intended. Hereby removing their guaranteed chargeback protection.

When i made this last post i also noted that Paypal wouldn't be the only payment option to be heavily regulated. I stated that creditcards were soon to follow and that G2A would duke out some sort of update to loosen them from their fraud liabilities created by the merchants accepting payments via their platform. That day has finally come.

G2A has stated that they will require merchants to perform their own KYC (know your customer) checks when identifying customers. Merchants who neglect to do this will be fined. Further fines can also be thrown ontop if a merchant's fraud level is above the noral avarage. If the fines keep piling up, G2A account suspension will follow with no chance on reopening an account with G2A in the future. Seeing as how the online market is pretty fraud sensitive, i can see this being a future problem for many merchants. Important to notice is that they didn't state "Creditcard" persé. They referred to all the payment options that are fraud sensitive (so basically anything bank related). Aka : creditcards, iDEAL, Bancontact, Skrill, Neteller, Trustly, ESP, the list goes on.

No disrespect to certain sites but i think this is a good thing as some sites (like my own) don't rely on G2A their "eye closing" attitude for creditcard fraud to begin with. We deal with fraud ourselves and cover the losses where they occur and have been doing so for months now. Too many sites take risky payments that come from carders and let them order more just because they know G2A wont take any money from them if a chargeback occurs which in return attracts more carders to the market. It's even gotten so bad that someone passed me a guide a few months ago which was a "Carding guide with 100% success rate". One of the methods in this guide was buying Runescape gold from sites through G2A and then selling the carded RS gold to another site for Bitcoin.

This update from G2A is in my opinion WAY overdue but i'm glad it's finally coming end May of this year.

Would like to hear from other marketeers what they think of the upcoming G2A update, good or bad?

 

Damn @RSGM Sales your rebrand is looking good so far, great job!

This G2A news sounds good, I always thought of how risky it is to do business via credit card, which is why we don't accept.

Thanks for the insight!

 

G2APay does a pretty good job with their anti-fraud. They deny a decent amount of payments, restrict total order size, cross reference customer data, etc. all for a very low price per transaction. Their methods of anti-fraud are not intrusive. They rarely request a phone call, almost never request ID. It's only possible to do anti-fraud on this level with access to big data.

Of course their KYC isn't going to be 100% perfect. Some stuff can slip through nearly any system. Even a company like Coinbase gets hit sometimes. But for the price they charge, G2APay does mitigate a large percentage of fraudulent payments, albeit at the expense of turning away a percentage of legitimate customers (false positives).

I guarantee whatever KYC policies you have on your end are less efficient and more intrusive than G2APay. You do not have access to the data they do. They have the purchase history of 20+ RSGP sites, hundreds or thousands of websites in the games industry. With that data they can quickly identify and blacklist bad actors across the entire network of websites.

You, on the other hand, only have data from your own site. So your data alone will not be enough. You will need to call people, ask for ID, limit their order sizes and frequencies in less efficient ways.

G2APay needs to prevent chargebacks on their CC processor, because if they reach a certain level, the processor could cut business with them. Perhaps they have found that certain websites are not taking KYC seriously and just relying completely on G2APay KYC. For some websites that may be enough. But ultimately, if a website is posing a risk to their business by exposing themselves to high risk, then G2APay needs to do something. I'd rather they "fine" me than just disable the payment method (which they have done in the past).

I'll wait and see what these fines consist of before casting doubt. Is it just a $15-20 chargeback fee like we see on nearly every other processor? Is it some random high amount that is assigned arbitrarily? We'll have to see. But I certainly wouldn't consider this change to be the "end of G2APay". That's definitely over reactive. It has much less impact than the recent PayPal changes, that's for sure.

 

With both the Paypal advantage gone and now the possibility of getting fined for high fraud levels (which will happen regardless anyways as we all know how the Runescape market works) i think it's best to stay clear from G2A as a merchant if the fines are out of control. If u only get fined a couple dollars then all is good but i have my doubts on the durability of this. I don't think the problem will consist in the fines, i think the problem will be that G2A is gonna remove merchants from their platform that hurt their reputation with financial institutions.

All in all, indeed G2A has a lot of data that they can work with. But compared to a person that knows his niche, their anti fraud system is a load of baloney. We have a (if i say so myself) superb anti fraud system put in place and most of the blocks involve around 1 aspect of the Runescape market which most fraudsters have in common and G2A doesn't even have the ability to check this let alone block out payments that match the criteria. We get tons of payments each month and we get about 2-3 chargebacks a month to deal with and even then most of them are like a max of $100.

 

This just puts websites who had experience in the market before g2a era ahead of the game again. Hopefully this will result in a healthier market because seeing margins of some people makes me question their risk management.

 

Well said.