$50 Charge with Chou Force International
Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
If You 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.
If you are dealing with these frustrations, feel free to reach out to me directly at yukaichou.com/contact. You can also learn more about the Octalysis Framework and the behavioral design work Chou Force International does through gamification.
I hope this will be over soon and everyone can get their money back.
God Bless.
Related Reading
- The Octalysis Framework for Gamification & Behavioral Design
- What is Gamification? Definition, Examples & Framework
- Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges & Leaderboards
- How Yu-kai Chou Pioneered Gamification in 2003
- 90+ Gamification Examples & Cases with ROI Stats
- The $1.06 Billion Octalysis Gamification Case Study
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.
⚡ Speed Run Notes
- Clarifications are a form of trust infrastructure, even when the topic is boring. A business that proactively explains charges builds more trust than one that waits for customers to ask. Trust compounds over unglamorous moments far more than over marketing pushes.
- The psychology of an unexpected charge is CD8 (Loss Avoidance) at full strength. Seeing an unknown charge triggers panic out of proportion to the dollar amount. Even a $50 mystery feels like a threat. Addressing it quickly is emotional first aid, not administrative hygiene.
- Short clarification posts outperform long ones for this category. Customers with a question want the answer in 5 seconds. A thousand-word explanation feels defensive. Confidence speaks briefly.
- Publishing the clarification publicly is a signal of confidence. Hiding billing questions in support emails suggests shame. Answering them publicly suggests transparency. The public answer is the better brand move even though it draws more attention to the question.
- The deepest insight: customer service posts are the most re-read content on any creator's site. They don't trend. They don't go viral. But when someone needs them, they matter more than any flagship essay. Writing them with care is quiet use most creators overlook.
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.