Stolen cards, chargebacks and other Substack nightmares you should know

Y’all, I just had the weirdest experience and I wanted to tell you about it because I learned something I didn’t know, and you might not know, and you should.

Want to see something strange? I had a subscriber sign up for a paid subscription on two consecutive days. First on Aug 9, and again on Aug 10. Weird, hey?

I know, I know. It looks dicey as hell, right? Who uses x’s for their profile?

Who can actually read 996 Substacks?

But still. How did one person pay twice? Because I pay for some Substacks and it doesn’t even LET me subscribe twice. When I go to a Substack I have a paid subscription to, there’s no “subscribe” option because I AM subscribed.

Out came the Nancy Drew detective hat. I started poking around and found a whole bunch of stuff you should know if you have paid subscriptions turned on, or plan to.

First, I logged into Substack, went to my subscribers and looked up the email address. Look at the revenue column. A monthly paid member who’s paid $0.00. What?

Important thing to know — if a paid subscriber shows $0.00, it could just mean the transaction hasn’t passed from Stripe to Substack yet so don’t freak out too fast.

The weird part was getting TWO notifications. Why two?

As I dug in to find out what was happening, I learned a bunch of stuff I hadn’t known or really even thought about. And it’s not like I’m some dumbass who isn’t aware that all kinds of fraud happen online. I’m aware. My clients are in ecommerce and I’m faced with online fraud on a regular basis. But it’s real easy to just write and not think about what’s happening behind the curtain. Especially if you came here from Medium because they pay royalties and writers don’t have to deal with all that stuff.

So let’s go on a journey, I’ll show you…

Note to readers: This post is locked because I like to offer a little extra to paid subscribers as a thank you for supporting my work. Because of paid members, I don’t have to seek out sponsors or sell you anything besides my writing and my experience and I appreciate that support from the bottom of my heart.