Most brands are investing millions in creating seamless, generous customer experiences. But what if a small fraction of your customers are exploiting that generosity, forcing your best, most loyal customers to unknowingly pay an ‘abuse tax’ through higher prices or stricter policies?
Agility requires moving beyond static, one-size-fits-all policies and embedding real-time intelligence into the moments that matter. It’s about empowering teams to adapt not just to who the customer is, but what they intend to do right now.
Today, we are here at eTail Palm Springs and we’re going to talk about a massive, and often invisible, threat to brand profitability and customer loyalty: post-purchase abuse. While brands have spent years optimizing the path to purchase, the moments that happen after the sale—returns, refunds, and support interactions—have become a significant source of margin leakage, pitting the goals of the CX team against the financial health of the business.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, Breanna Moreno, Head of CX at NoFraud.
About Breanna Moreno
Breanna Moreno is CX Architect at NoFraud, where she helps ecommerce brands reduce post-purchase fraud and policy abuse while empowering customer experience teams to operate more strategically. With more than 13 years of experience building and scaling high-growth CX organizations, Breanna previously served as Vice President of CX and the first employee at True Classic, leading the support function through rapid DTC expansion and transforming it from a reactive cost center into a data-driven driver of brand performance. Today, she brings that brand-side perspective to NoFraud, serving as a bridge between fraud prevention technology and the frontline teams responsible for protecting revenue, loyalty, and customer trust.
Breanna Moreno on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/breanna-moreno-183a8459/
Resources
NoFraud: https://www.nofraud.com/
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Transcript
[00:06:40] Greg Kihlstrom: Most brands are investing millions in creating seamless, generous customer experiences. But what if a small fraction of your customers are exploiting that generosity, forcing your best, most loyal customers to unknowingly pay an abuse tax through their higher prices or stricter policies? Agility requires moving beyond static, one-size-fits-all policies and embedding real-time intelligence into the moments that matter. It’s about empowering teams to adapt not just to who the customer is, but what they intend to do right now. Today we’re here at Etail Palm Springs, and we’re going to talk about a massive and often invisible threat to brand profitability and customer loyalty, post-purchase abuse. While brands have spent years optimizing the path to purchase, the moments that happen after the sale, returns, refunds, and support interactions have become a significant source of margin leakage, pitting the goals of the CX team against the financial health of the business. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Breanna Moreno, Head of CX at NoFraud. Breanna, welcome to the show.
[01:50:66] Breanna Moreno: Thank you so much for having me. I’m super honored to be here.
[01:53:23] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, looking forward to this conversation and, you know, as I said, definitely, you know, there, I, I think this needs to be talked about a bit more, right?
[02:00:04] Breanna Moreno: Yes, yes. I’m excited to broaden everybody’s perspective on what is fraud. I think generally people think they know, but, I’m excited to dive in and, and hopefully help everybody kind of understand what it is and, and what’s out there, what we need to look out for.
[02:16:92] Greg Kihlstrom: Absolutely. Yeah. So, before we do that, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at NoFraud?
[02:21:28] Breanna Moreno: Yeah. So exciting. I just joined the team in January.
[02:24:62] Greg Kihlstrom: Congrats.
[02:25:22] Breanna Moreno: No pressure. Just baptized by fire here.
[02:28:44] Greg Kihlstrom: Just throwing you right into the fire.
[02:29:40] Breanna Moreno: I know, I know. But it’s good. It’s good. I, I’m super excited to be here. I came from the brand side. So I’ve, I’ve lived it, breathed it, and so my hope and aspiration is to come here into the SAS side, the tech side, and really help build better products to show up for our merchants. so again, you know, my my tenure has been in the brand space. I’ve I’ve had all of this experience and kind of understanding from a brand perspective, a merchant perspective. and then I I built some really great tools and solutions with some some partners throughout the SAS community, and I’m just excited to come and join the team at a really exciting time and, and kind of see where we take it.
[03:11:80] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Love it. Well, yeah, let’s, let’s dive in. I want to start with the, maybe at a high level here. So for years fraud prevention was primarily focused on the moment of transaction.
[03:22:78] Breanna Moreno: Yes.
[03:23:44] Greg Kihlstrom: What has changed in consumer behavior and the competitive landscape that’s shifted the biggest financial threat from that checkout to the post-purchase experience?
[03:32:04] Breanna Moreno: Yeah, I think again, systems originally were designed to meet customer at checkout, like you mentioned. We’ve all been kind of reset to that Amazon experience, right? And the reality is, we know shopping behaviors are changing, like right now our industry is estimating returns of abuse and and, you know, potential fraud is just exponentially greater than I think what merchants can attribute. And that’s because all of these these these different fraud tactics or initiatives are across many different systems. So we’re excited to kind of dive in and really build solutions that are going to protect merchants, allow you to overindex on those really good customers because we know how sensitive costs are right now for our merchants. So again, we want to provide solutions that are actually going to be impactful, not just another, you know, stack in your in your tech lineup, but again, something that’s actually going to provide value.
[04:35:10] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And so you mentioned all those systems and, you know, just that fragmentation across not only tools but teams too, right? So, you know, as, as kind of a blind spot there, you know, how should a marketing or CX leader reframe this, you know, is this just kind of cost of doing business or is it a fundamental operational issue that’s, you know, causing all of those things that you’re mentioned, you know, eroding margins, all, all those things as well as the experience for customers.
[05:02:50] Breanna Moreno: Yeah, no, it’s definitely an operational issue that obviously directly impacts the profitability of that customer experience. So like I said, we’re super in tune with, you know, brands having really tight margins right now. We have, you know, from an industry perspective, like we understand that things are tight and brands have to be more strategic. And the reality is, I don’t think many brands even understand the cost of these potential abuse or fraudsters because it’s so sporadic. And so that’s why we’re super excited to be here and to and to help educate. and again, we we can run diagnostics to even just look, maybe you’re not, maybe you’re not, you know, being targeted for abuse. But a lot of CX leaders, I can sit down with them again, having been in their shoes and say like, how many conversations have you had where people are asking for discount codes? How many conversations have you had where people are like, hey, my package arrived damaged. Here’s a picture. And so it’s really exciting to have solutions now to be able to limit the risk because as an agent, you’re just like reacting, right? You’re like, I I’ve got to work on a K P I, I got to respond to this within X amount of time, and it takes so much just literal probing to find, is this person telling me the truth? And then, you know, even something down to photos can be manipulated in today’s day and age with today’s technology. And so I’m super excited that we have solutions to minimize the risk for those CX leaders, to be able to give them the assurances that like, hey, this a good customer, why don’t you activate a surprise and delight for them, right? Whether that be an immediate refund or maybe you give them, you know, additional benefit to exchange. Whatever that may be, these brands can make specific decisions with confidence, knowing that they have the data at their fingertips.
[07:03:57] Greg Kihlstrom: Right. Right. Yeah, so the the visibility there lets them make the best decision.
[07:08:70] Breanna Moreno: Exactly. Yeah, meet the customer where they’re at in in a good situation, right? Create loyalty, drive experience, and then we can create those those breaks, hit those breaks in the other capacity where maybe it’s a potential fraud abuse, maybe it is an actual fraud ring, like all of those activations, which you don’t have to sit there and go probe and look through Shopify records and search shipping addresses cause people use different email addresses. So, you know, people get more and more intuitive with fraud, unfortunately. and there’s even instances where maybe it’s friendly fraud. You know, where they don’t necessarily, they’re not coming in as a bad person, but they think, oh, I can manipulate this brand. They can afford it.
[07:52:16] Greg Kihlstrom: Right.
[07:52:50] Breanna Moreno: and the unfortunate part is, we know, brands can’t afford it. you may think they’re a big giant company because, you know, they’re shipping all over the world, but at the end of the day, their margins are so tight that this does impact them. This does impact their overhead. This does impact how they run their business. So.
[08:08:26] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. I mean, I think and I think that’s an interesting point is, you know, there there’s probably a traditional view of fraud and the the criminals that perpetrate that fraud. and you mentioned, you know, there are fraud rings and there there are all of those things, you know, certainly. But some of the this, is also from people that, you know, you kind of refer to of, you know, there’s financial insecurity, there’s there’s other things that there’s a a little gray area maybe in in in how they’re thinking, let’s put it that way.
[08:40:50] Breanna Moreno: Yeah.
[08:40:94] Greg Kihlstrom: How does this shift from a, you know, criminal fraud, you know, kind of a binary issue to a more rationalized abuse mindset change how CX and operations teams should tactically handle these things?
[08:54:33] Breanna Moreno: Yeah, so you can think and especially if you’re in the CX space, you can think of social media. Every CX leader is like the minute a customer says, I’m going to post about you on social media, you’re immediately like, oh my gosh. No. Oh, shoot. Oh, shoot. The same applies for any type of manipulative activation that this person may want to do. So they may be upset about some sort of a situation. They may be like, hey, guys, I just happened to get, I found this code and it gave me 100% off my order. And then it piles on, much like social media does, and it can lead to thousands of people taking advantage and your company now has thousands of free orders that should not have happened, right? And all because of one person posting about it. And we actually had this happen to a brand that we work with. And so they were so excited to partner with us because now we just minimized that risk. Because now with our network, we can identify situations like that and they can immediately catch it versus waiting. That’s the other part with social media, like, often times those conversations are happening over here in nowhere land. You as a brand don’t necessarily get wind of it unless you were tagged or unless somebody shares it with you, like maybe one of your good customers is like, hey, heads up, have you seen this? And this has happened to me at several brands I’ve worked with. So this again the reality of the social complexities that we’re working with. So, so the beauty is being able to have a solution with NoFraud and our new acquired partner, Yofi, has been something that me as a CX leader dreamed about. Like literally dreamed about. I mean, I remember the days way back when when we were Googling these people to try to understand who they were. And in a space where we did like warehouse sales, right? Where they’re like in person, super low costs, zero margins. You’re just trying to get rid of inventory. And then people try to take that, manipulate. I mean, I’m telling you, we as and I was a group of like moms. We worked together, and we were like investigating to try to determine, is this person ripping us off? So again, to be able to have that at your fingertips is something that’s just so innovative and I’m so excited to be part of it.
[01:13:95] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, and I mean, you know, to that point, all of the people involved at at the brand, their jobs, this this something in addition to. Like I, you know, there’s systems to prevent certain types of fraud. This I would imagine a lot more subtle and harder to detect. And so, you know, it would need to be a team’s full-time job almost to do that.
[01:36:26] Breanna Moreno: and to be honest with you, a lot of brands do have that.
[01:38:70] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
[01:39:46] Breanna Moreno: In historically that payment fraud, those charge backs, like that’s been again, very upfront at checkout where you can minimize risk, which is great, and we need that 100%. But again, there’s always those those post-purchase experiences that people were now seeing are manipulating. For instance, they’re manipulating tracking IDs. They’re manipulating tracking and it’s so crazy to me because my mind is immediately like, well, how do they do that? And our team is like, here’s the websites that you can go to. And I’m just like, wow. Wow, mind boggling because when you get that support ticket, you’re just like, oh wow, your tracking says delivered, our warehouse didn’t you know, submit your return, let me go ahead and just do that for you. Meanwhile, you’re now out the money, you’ve refunded them, they still have the product, and you’re they could be doing this over and over and over and over again. So what we’ve seen from an industry is returns, you know, a hundred billion plus is probably more likely higher than that because again, like we talked about those those incremental costs that are within various tools. So I don’t even think, I I’m sure it’s far over a hundred billion. But the reality is, you have all of this different type of abuse happening to your brand, whether friendly, like again, people are like, oh, no big deal, they ship me two, I’m just going to keep I’m just going to keep this one versus those that are are more in in, you know, intuitive. And so this where you saw brands cutting so much in the experience level, like now we’re going to charge for returns because they couldn’t, they couldn’t, it wasn’t sustainable for them. And so I’m super excited again that we can be able to build a solution that makes that impact to drive more revenue so we can, we can bring in more revenue on the upfront, right? We’re going to prove more of your, your payments. We’re going to minimize risk with charge backs, and then on the back end, we’re protecting you from that return and policy abuse. Policy abuse is like those conversational aspects of of support where your agents, you could have a giant team, you could have a teeny tiny team. Again, we just want them to be able to work smarter and not be so handicapped and have assurances that look, I’m going to take care of this customer. I’m going to go above and beyond versus whoa, I’m going to pump the brakes. And we can, you know, automate both. Brands have the ability to make the decisions of of of how they, you know, deem best for for their specific brand guidelines, functions, whatever. But, but yeah, it’s just it’s, it’s been crazy to see the transformation of our industry, especially from being in it and from the very beginning to now of how unfortunately intuitive these fraudsters can get.
[02:24:99] (Music)
[02:33:43] Greg Kihlstrom: And so then from from measuring this, I mean, certainly there’s, there’s some, some obvious metrics I’m sure that that, you know, are that we could talk about. But what, what are some of the key metrics that, you know, when you’re working with, with people at brands, like what should they be paying attention to that maybe they’re not immediately thinking of?
[02:53:14] Breanna Moreno: Yeah, I would really challenge people to start looking at how much are you paying for all of these incremental costs, which you’re probably attributing to a cost of doing business, an operational cost, like we talked about. Look at that and really try to narrow down, how much are we spending? Because the reality is, you might want to equip your your, you know, support teams with empowerment to make better business decisions to to to lower those costs. So I’m I’m always thinking cost-wise and I’m like thinking, you know, just should you have that item returned back or is that costing you more? So, so brands can determine, look, are you, are you refunding upon inspection or are you refunding upon tracking? You know, once you put it in the mail and then they carrier scans it, you’re going to get your refund versus warehouse needs to inspect it. There is so much opportunity to really drive into those costs and understand those costs. When we think of success, you know, we’ve had a we’ve had a really great case study with Everlane. Encourage everybody to go take a look at it because they saw 30 to $40,000 in F T I D fraud eliminated. So that’s that’s only one little piece of fraud. and now they have 100% visibility into that return fraud activity, like like we talked about, all those different types of return fraud or abuse. So now their support agents are so much more impactful because again, they have that visibility and they can act, they can activate on that. Another case study that we have on our site that again, I want to encourage people to go check out is Monday Swimwear. Perfect example. They increased revenue by almost 4%, and then they cut charge backs by 92%.
[03:38:40] Greg Kihlstrom: Wow.
[03:38:72] Breanna Moreno: So you can imagine charge backs, like, you not only pay the charge back fee, you lose the money, and then you pay processing fees again on top of that. So it’s like those are the incremental costs that I don’t think, I’m sure the finance team is thinking of, but a lot of us in e-commerce are not necessarily aware of all of those incremental costs that that add up to the to the grand total of things. So, yes, very, very exciting to see brands immediately see ROI because you are saving on multiple, you know, replacement orders for claims. My order didn’t arrive. and just again, like manipulating photos, which is a scary thing. No, I I’m sure so many people out there aren’t even thinking, is this a real is this a real photo? And I’m going to tell all of you e-com people out there right now, like, there’s a ton of photos on the on the inner webs of your product damaged that people are are leveraging to their benefit and manipulating the the situation. So.
[04:42:04] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, it’s they they don’t, I I keep saying like they keep adding things, they don’t take anything away.
[04:48:98] Breanna Moreno: No, no, I know. I know. It’s so yeah, cause what used to be like, oh, charge back fraud, like.
[04:53:77] Greg Kihlstrom: Right. Right.
[04:54:30] Breanna Moreno: They got the product and then we’re in and then we’re combating it in support again, right? We’re we’re pushing we’re pushing back that evidence, as we call it, now with NoFraud, like we’re able to build that and process that for you, so you don’t have to carry that weight. I remember at True Classic, I was a an early adopter of NoFraud because I was like, my team was literally fighting charge backs day in and day out. So immediately offloaded that to NoFraud, and then we were still managing those back-end, those post-purchase situations that happen in CX that you just have no way to even measure because they’re conversational. So, yeah.
[05:34:65] Greg Kihlstrom: Lots to yeah.
[05:35:67] Breanna Moreno: I know, it’s mind-blowing. It really is.
[05:38:54] Greg Kihlstrom: Maybe maybe to to take that even further, you know, as you kind of look out to the the future of bits, you know, when we talk about customer intent, so understanding what a customer is trying to do right now, as as the next evolution of personalization. How do you see this concept moving beyond fraud prevention to shape the entire post-purchase journey from everything from proactive support to loyalty programs?
[05:50:06] Breanna Moreno: Yes, it’s really an interesting time in in e-commerce, particularly as customers and brands are are giving greater agency to agentic shopping solutions. So again, all of that is shifting, right? To discover, you know, how customers are finding brands. It it puts a lot of of onus on the product and the experience that customers have with the brand after their purchase, right? So I think a lot of people are are really honed in on that. Obviously brands, we all need to prioritize and optimize that checkout experience, but that post-purchase experience is really what’s going to determine whether a customer comes back or not. And even from a fraud perspective. When when we kind of come right out and give them a a slight notice, like, hey, we might be on to you, they’re more likely to retreat and go, oh, shoot, they have these measures in place. This probably something I can’t probe and they kind of go away quietly, which is, which is great. That’s a win-win for everybody.
[06:07:44] Greg Kihlstrom: Well, I also imagine they might post elsewhere. It’s like the the inverse viral effect of like, oh, don’t bother with these people, right?
[06:15:33] Breanna Moreno: Exactly. And just so you know, there are those dark webs. I remember when I was at True Classic, that was something that made me choose NoFraud when I was doing my analysis for payment fraud solutions, is because they told me that we were on this dark web thread of how to abuse our return policy.
[06:36:20] Greg Kihlstrom: Oh, wow.
[06:36:64] Breanna Moreno: And so there are these literal, like me and you, normal people in the universe, aren’t even thinking about, is there’s a whole entire industry that is absolutely thriving on your brand’s demise, or taking it up. It’s so sad. It’s so sad that that’s the reality. But but yeah, so, you know, we’re we’re I think so fixated on on like, who is the customer? But now with the NoFraud Yofi solution, we’re really able to say, what is this customer trying to do right now? So it’s so much more intentional, and then we can help the brands kind of position themselves to to activate one thing or another to show up and hopefully take the most advantage of that customer whether it’s like eliminating the fraud aspect, they go away, they don’t purchase, or you’re going to create this lifelong consumer that is absolutely indebted to your brand because they feel empowered and supported and all of that. So I think again, one of the biggest things we’re focused on right now is a lot of this happening, like we’ve talked about, in support. So while it’s great that we’re integrated and embedded and partnered with all of these different tech solutions to minimize their risk as well and come up and support brands kind of on the back end. The reality is a significant, if not the majority of this fraud is happening in day-to-day conversations with customer support teams. Which is, which is crazy to think about. Because you’re like, how do you scale that? How do you attribute cost associated to that? Again, my finance team’s are going, support, why are you spending X amount, right? and giving free orders, what is this for? Support’s like, well, they’ve they didn’t get their order, it didn’t arrive. So again, you you see the policy, the claims, I didn’t get my order. to where I sent my return back. I had this one the other day with the brand I was working with. I sent my return back and it arrived somewhere else.
[07:38:62] Greg Kihlstrom: Oh, yeah.
[07:39:74] Breanna Moreno: Not at your warehouse. And it’s always like support agents have an intuition. We generally know, like, hm, this feels fishy. And sure enough, they did F T I D. And it was two orders, each valued at $400. So it’s like you it just, they think they can bypass, but it with, you know, solutions like the NoFraud Yofi product, we’re hoping that we can equip customer support agents, CX teams with that data so that they can then confidently address the conversation, you know, put whatever process in place and hopefully drive save costs, drive more revenue.
[08:16:11] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, I love it. Well, we’ll have to, we’ll have to keep talking and how things progress here. Well, Breanna, thanks so much for joining today. Two two questions for you as we wrap up here. first, you know, we’re here at Etail Palm Springs, beautiful weather, beautiful location, great content. What’s been a highlight of for you so far?
[08:33:43] Breanna Moreno: Honestly, the weather has been absolutely amazing. I feel guilty because poor Scott, our CEO, couldn’t be here because he was stuck in the in the winter snow storm. So I feel a little guilty, but I’m also like, this beautiful weather. Absolutely beautiful. And we had Southern California last week had terrible rain. Like terrible. And you know, Californians, we can’t function in the rain. So it it the weather has been so great. And honestly, getting out here to see amazing partners, amazing customers. We had an amazing dinner last night. We’re attending a CX mixer now. We’re hosting that. It’s going to be exciting. it’s it’s fun. I think just getting face-time with each other is probably always my favorite part of these these events.
[08:42:37] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, love it. And last question for you, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[08:44:03] Breanna Moreno: Yeah, I think innovation is always top of mind for me. So where are we going to be in two years from now is constantly kind of where my mind goes. So building solutions and product for that now is going to help us drive our merchants to to have even more value with us. So I’m really excited to partner with some really amazing thought leaders and show up for these merchants in in probably a way that that not many tech companies or SAS companies are doing. So I’m just excited to be part of the organization, bringing a totally different thought process into the org and really challenging all of our thought partners to to think merchant first and customer first and how do we drive value continuously. So yeah, it’s exciting. I can’t wait to see where we are in like 90 days from now. it’s going to be a a whole new company.
