Curbside pickup fraud is the exploitation of buy online, pick up at curbside services to obtain goods without legitimate payment or to extract refunds on orders that were actually collected. The speed and low verification friction that make curbside convenient for shoppers also make it attractive to bad actors.
How Curbside Pickup Fraud Works
Three patterns dominate. Stolen-card curbside orders convert card fraud into merchandise within the hour, before the cardholder ever sees the charge, and with no shipping address trail for screening to check. False non-receipt claims assert that a collected order was never picked up, exploiting handoffs where verification was a wave and a first name. And pickup interception collects someone else’s order using details phished or socially engineered from the real customer, the curbside cousin of interception fraud. The same dynamics apply to in-store collection; see buy online, pick up in store.
How to Prevent Curbside Pickup Fraud
Tighten the handoff without killing the convenience: require the order confirmation code or ID at pickup, log who collected what and when, and restrict pickup-person changes after purchase. Upstream, screen curbside orders with the urgency they deserve, since the fraud window closes at collection: real-time decisioning matters more here than anywhere, because there is no fulfillment delay in which to catch a bad order.
How Wyllo Helps
Wyllo Payment Fraud Protection decides in real time, which is what curbside timelines demand, and Wyllo Claim and Policy Abuse Prevention catches the false non-receipt claims that follow collected orders, judged against the claimant’s history rather than the claim alone.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is curbside pickup riskier than shipping for stolen-card orders?
Speed and anonymity. Shipping gives merchants hours or days to catch a bad order and a physical address as evidence; curbside gives minutes and a license plate at best.
Does requiring ID at pickup hurt the customer experience?
Applied to every order, it adds friction most shoppers notice. Applied by risk, high value orders, new identities, mismatched signals, it protects the service while leaving trusted customers untouched.
