I made this post because in the past 1-2 days, my education platform Octalysis Prime suddenly got close to a thousand new sign-ups from emails that look very similar, but they were all using unique and valid credit cards.
It seems like someone stole hundreds of credit card information and purchased premium accounts on my platform.
Since they went through the traditional routes with valid credit cards, we couldn’t block them without blocking valid customers (but we added enough friction to the process it finally stopped, hurting our true customers that want to pay). Not sure why the attackers would do this but perhaps an attack to get us removed as fraud?
Sure enough, the transactions were red flagged by our payment processor and the funds were frozen. We are still scrambling to manually refund everyone, but now even refunding is frozen by our processor for some reason.
And now I’m getting messages of people being angry that their cards are being charged and threatening to report this to their banks as fraud.
If you are someone that got charged $50 from Chou Force International
First of all, yes this is a fraudulent charge. Even though we at Chou Force did not cause it, I am sorry that you have to go through this too. First of all, please disable your Credit/Debit Card because it is obviously compromised.
Second of all, don’t worry – I will use all my power to make sure you get your money back. Once the Payment Processor (Braintree owned by PayPal) clears everything and frees the account we will refund it back.
I am a Published Author and Lecturer. at many Universities. Feel free to keep me accountable at yukai [at] chou force [period] com. This is my LinkedIn.
I hope this will be over soon and everyone can get their money back.
God Bless.
Get mentored by Yu-kai Chou
Every week I hop on a conference call to teach, answer questions, and give feedback to members of Octalysis Prime. If you want to take your Gamification practice to the next level, then come join us.