friendly fraud (uncountable)
- A type of fraud in which a customer purchases and receives an item using a credit card, then requests a spurious chargeback to obtain a refund, effectively gaining the item for free.
2003 May 13, Jennifer Bayot, “Company Sues MasterCard Over Fees for Online Sales”, in The New York Times[1], archived from the original on 2022-03-19:David Robertson, publisher of The Nilson Report, said Internet companies were plagued by "friendly fraud," in which "your perfectly valid cardholder can deny a transaction he willingly made."
2014 December 10, Ines Novacic, “This fraud may be "friendly," but costs are high”, in CBS News[2], archived from the original on 2022-08-17:The steps for investigating a chargeback are tedious and labor-intensive, so most merchants don't bother with them, especially for lower-cost items. This makes friendly fraud easier to pull off, even if some consumers are unaware that they're doing anything wrong.
2019 January 25, Alex Hern, “Facebook let children run up huge bills, court papers show”, in The Guardian[3], archived from the original on 2022-08-10:Internally, the company described the problem as one of "friendly fraud", and one staff member, who was in charge of a project to increase the company's game revenues, said it was particularly bad with a few games, including "PetVille, Happy Aquarium, Wild Ones, Barn Buddy and any Ninja game".
