Issues with CC Companies flagging JustGiving transactions as fraud?

Kelly Hunter

We just started our first campaign and are getting feedback that some donors are getting fraud notifications after donations are processed.

Heather MacKenzie

I had one happen last year, but none so far this year. Hope someone knows a way around this!

Kelly Hunter

i'm not sure how widespread the issue is - but wanted to bring it up just incase.

Josh Grabia

This would not be coming from JustGiving as a product, rather the fraud detection in BBMS. Here is some additional information on what may trigger a transaction to be suspect of fraud -

https://kb.blackbaud.com/knowledgebase/articles/Article/60820

If you have some examples you would like us to look into further, please do reach out to our Support teams https://support.blackbaud.com/

Kellie DeMers

What Josh posted is incorrect. We ran into this issue in November 2021 when setting up JustGiving for a Snowmobile Ride event. I was on both phone and chat with a Justgiving Tech Support person, who had to do some investigation with the engineers. We found out it is caused by program coding in JustGiving (must have happened some time in late summer because it wasn't there for our June Paddle), not Blackbaud Merchant Services. When the person enters their credit card number, before the amount is charged, JustGiving sends it to the card's bank to ‘verify that the bank will allow the card to be charged’. If the bank responds negatively or doesn't respond, that error message occurred. It was such a problem that we temporarily switched back to FirstGiving, which we used before JustGiving, for our event. I'm hoping BB can figure out a solution because we do like JustGiving but can't take the chance that we will miss out on donations because of that message. We knew it wasn't BBMS because we also have a separate event donation page directly through Etapestry that also uses BBMS and were having no problem with donations to that page.

Kelly Murphy

THIS JUST HAPPENED TO OUR ORGANIZATION!!

We had staff and board members testing the campaign page before it went live. The board member who's card was flagged as fraudulent actually works at the bank who flagged it. The IP address for Just Giving is located in the United Kingdom. The bank told us this is going to continue to happen with other banks. So far we've tested with four cards and two were flagged.

The tech support person said:

Already verified with our internal team, as mentioned before, JustGiving servers are based in UK, unfortunately, we are not able to change the transactions to be processed in US, it will have the UK IP addresses, our recommendation on those situations is to tell the donors to allow international transactions, this is not really common, but it could happen with other banks. Apologies for any inconvenience this might cause.

I'm not going to tell donors to open their accounts up to allow international transactions. This really REALLY irritates me because it was NEVER communicated.

Kelly Murphy

This is completely inaccurate based upon the response from JustGiving support:

Already verified with our internal team, as mentioned before, JustGiving servers are based in UK, unfortunately, we are not able to change the transactions to be processed in US, it will have the UK IP addresses, our recommendation on those situations is to tell the donors to allow international transactions, this is not really common, but it could happen with other banks. Apologies for any inconvenience this might cause.

Kellie DeMers

Yes, it happened to us as well. We ended up dumping JustGiving for our one event and going with FirstGiving, a Panorama product, which is a real pain because you have the download the transactions and upload them into Etapestry, our CRM. It usually takes about 3 hours to download, code the Account #s (and add new ones) set up the spreadsheet to import and then import the spreadsheet. When we used JustGiving it was just a case of linking the two systems together with an API and the gifts came across flawlessly. Our org is too small for me to have an assistant and this issue just adds to the workload. This ‘fraud’ notification was not there in the summer when we did our Paddle. It must have just been added, and if that is the case, they need to address the UK versus US programming. Maybe we can put in an idea suggesting this.

Rachel Cavalier

Definitely sounds like it would be handy if the JustGiving's payment system could detect where a user was and direct them to US-based servers for you guys, rather than the UK-based ones that the rest of us use.

Weirdly, I think we'd have to stop using JustGiving if the servers moved outside of Europe because of our organisations data policy.

Stephanie Thomas

Hi all,

We appreciate the feedback and to expand a little on this thread, there could be a few different root causes here at play. As you can imagine, it is hard for us to know based on what has been shared via the community, but if we take a step back, I hope to explain a little more about what is happening behind the scenes.

There are two main concerns here:

Donors could be getting a fraud message from their bank. This is a quick check (known as Zero Auth) that JustGiving does before sending the transaction to Blackbaud Merchant Services™ (BBMS) to ensure the card being used is valid and the payment is likely to be authorized, without actually charging the card. We understand how alarming it would be as a donor to see the fraud message. As a result, Blackbaud plans to remove the requirement to pre-authorize the transaction for all US-based organizations on Blackbaud Merchant Services™ and just push through the actual charge. This increases the overall success rate of transactions and will go into effect on Feb 18, 2022. No action will be required of current customers in order to take advantage of this update.

US Banks are declining to process a valid donation. Most reports of this message come from accounts using Blackbaud Merchant Services™. This could be caused by any one of these reasons:

• JustGiving is using a foreign IP Address
• Bank gives a transaction a high fraud risk score
• Failure of an address check in BBMS

If you believe you are impacted by this issue, it is best to first start with BBMS and change the Address Verification Setting in BBMS to NONE. Try that for a while to see if it reduces the issue’s frequency. If not, you can chat with customer support for further troubleshooting or consider switching to process donations on our third-party provider which disburses via the Blackbaud Giving Fund. You can learn more about the DAF here.

We understand security and peace of mind, especially when it comes to donation processing, is critical to the trust and usage of any of your solutions. Please know we take these matters very seriously and work diligently behind the scenes to make sure your donors can give conveniently. These issues happen to a very small percentage of donations but we believe that by removing the authorization and decreasing the address verification setting (especially if you have a large number of donors overseas), you will see a higher success rate and happier donor.