Fraud teams often live and die by chargeback rate, but a new conversation with IPQS’ Alexander Hall argues that the real damage shows up elsewhere: account takeovers, false positives, manual reviews, support overload, refunds, and erosion of brand trust.
A fraud team can spend months tightening rules, watching chargeback rates, and feeling the pressure of card network thresholds. Then an account gets taken over anyway—quietly—while the dashboards stay stubbornly calm.
That disconnect is at the center of a conversation with Alexander Hall. the new VP of Fraud Strategy at IPQS. who recently sat down with Jordan Harris of The Fraud Boxer. The discussion focuses on a growing blind spot: fraud’s true impact often doesn’t surface in chargeback metrics. even when it hits revenue. operations. and brand trust.
Chargebacks are visible, painful, and easy to point to as the “north star” of fraud performance. The problem is that they capture only a narrow slice of fraud losses. When teams focus on them alone. bigger issues can hide behind the metric—issues that affect growth. customer experience. and long-term profitability.
The losses don’t stop at disputes. Some cases eat into margins just as much as chargebacks, yet they are rarely tagged as fraud in internal reporting. Without that labeling, the next risk decisions are made with incomplete information—turning measurement into a guess instead of a guide.
Account takeovers are a clear example. Ecommerce and airlines are experiencing a troubling rise in account takeovers (ATOs). Even when companies push for seamless user experiences, successful ATOs quickly undo that work. The fallout includes customer churn. higher acquisition costs tied to negative word of mouth. and off-platform identity theft enabled by stolen PII.
There are also direct losses: reimbursing stolen stored value, including loyalty points. Hall and Harris note that similar patterns are showing up elsewhere—iGaming platforms seeing fraudulent withdrawals after account changes. banking facing a surge in synthetic identity fraud. and money movement platforms dealing with identity theft used to create and operate fraudulent businesses.
The story that emerges is not hard to recognize. Disputes and chargebacks are only the visible surface. The rest shows up as operational drag, wasted resources, and customers quietly disappearing.
When fraud controls are too strict, good customers can get pushed out of the funnel. False positives are described as one of the largest and least visible costs of fraud prevention. A legitimate customer blocked because their IP, device, or email “looks risky” may abandon the purchase and never return.
From IPQS’ vantage point, this is where accurate risk scoring and tuning matter as much as catching fraud itself—because the goal isn’t just to stop bad transactions. It’s to stop the collateral damage.
That collateral damage has a second life inside operations. Every suspicious order that goes to manual review adds labor cost. slows fulfillment. and creates friction for customers waiting on decisions. Fraud-related tickets then pile up in support queues, including refund requests and account lockouts, alongside disputes over promotional abuse. Over time, the operational drag of managing fraud can rival direct loss—especially for high volume merchants and platforms.
And beyond cost and friction sits the hardest part to measure: trust. Fraud is framed as a trust problem. When accounts are taken over or fake accounts abuse a platform, legitimate users start to question whether their data and money are safe.
IPQS frequently works with companies where fraud has become a brand issue, not only a risk issue. Users lose confidence after seeing spam, scams, or repeated login problems, and organic growth slows because word of mouth suffers.
Against that backdrop, Hall’s push is to treat chargebacks as one outcome among many, not the whole picture. IPQS points to a set of additional metrics teams can track alongside chargebacks, including:
Approval rate for good customers
False positive rate, or “good customer decline” rate
Manual review rate and average decision time
Volume and value of fraud related refunds or credits
Abuse rates for promotions, referrals, and loyalty programs
Account takeover incidents and new account abuse volume
Tracking these measures side by side is meant to show whether fraud controls are actually supporting growth—or quietly pulling it down.
The measurement approach described by IPQS is also built around plugging visibility gaps rather than only blocking obvious bad payments. Their scoring is said to look at the user and their behavior across signals such as IP reputation. device intelligence. email history. and past abuse patterns—not only the payment details in front of you.
The objective for teams is spelled out as a three-part outcome: catch more fraud before it becomes a chargeback; reduce friction and false positives for legitimate customers; and identify patterns of abuse in accounts, promotions, and traffic sources.
When risk scores and signals align with internal outcomes data, IPQS says fraud metrics can shift from “chargebacks this month” to “total impact on revenue, costs, and growth.”
Hall also lays out a set of questions teams can ask inside their organizations if they want to measure fraud impact beyond chargebacks. Where are organizations writing off loss that is not labeled as fraud today?. How many legitimate orders are delayed or declined by current controls?. Which marketing or growth programs see the highest rate of abuse?. How often do fraud cases create support tickets or manual work for other teams?. And do risk, product, finance, and marketing share a view of fraud impact?.
Aligning on those answers is described as a way to move from reactive dispute handling toward a proactive fraud strategy.
Once chargebacks are recognized as only one symptom, the argument goes, fraud programs can be redesigned around wider outcomes. The strongest programs are described as ones that don’t just stop fraud. but actively protect customer experience. enable marketing to scale safely. and give leadership confidence that risk controls support long-term growth rather than restrict it.
IPQS also invites teams to sign up for a free trial to explore IPQS easy API solutions, positioned around preventing fraud before it starts.
fraud strategy chargebacks account takeovers ATOs false positives manual review risk scoring IPQS synthetic identity fraud iGaming fraud loyalty points customer churn support tickets