BORIS Is the Fastest-Growing Way to Commit Return Fraud

Retailers built buy-online-return-in-store to make customers' lives easier, and it worked. It also quietly opened one of the fastest-growing paths to commit return fraud, because the convenience runs straight through a seam retailers never fully closed: the gap between the system that took the order online and the till that hands back the refund.

The number attached to that gap is not small. BORIS-related fraud cost retailers an estimated $4 billion, according to Appriss Retail's 2026 Total Retail Loss Benchmark Report, out of $208 billion in returns now flowing through that channel. The report calls it the fastest-growing vector for fraud and abuse in retail returns.

What Is BORIS, and Why Does It Create Risk?

BORIS lets a customer buy online and return the item at a physical store, and the risk sits exactly where the two channels meet. The order was placed on the ecommerce platform. The refund is processed at a till built for in-store transactions. Unless those two systems share information in real time, the person handing back the money at the counter is often working with an incomplete picture of what was actually ordered.

That incompleteness is the opportunity. A return desk cannot always confirm the exact item, price, or even whether an online order genuinely exists for what is being handed over, especially under the pressure of a queue. The convenience customers love, returning anything, anywhere, is built on a handoff that, in a lot of retailers, was never designed to be watertight.

Why Don't the Two Systems Just Talk to Each Other?

Because most retailers built their ecommerce platform and their store systems years apart, for different purposes, and stitched them together later rather than designing them as one. When a store accepts a return for an online order, the ecommerce system needs to know immediately, and that handoff is exactly where most omnichannel returns break down, according to retail loss-prevention research.

This is not unique to any one retailer. It is a structural consequence of how most retail technology grew up: the web store and the physical store as separate empires, gradually bridged rather than built together. BORIS asks those two empires to cooperate on the exact transaction, refunds, where a gap is most costly, and in many retailers the bridge is thinner than the traffic now crossing it.

Do Customers Even Notice the Gap?

Yes, and it shapes how they behave. 62% of customers perceive the in-store and online return experience as different, a gap felt most acutely by frequent returners, the customers who cross that channel boundary most often. Whatever is happening behind the counter, shoppers can sense that the two halves of the business are not quite talking to each other.

That perception is not just a customer-experience footnote. A gap customers can feel is also a gap they, or people less well-intentioned than them, can learn to use. Once enough shoppers notice that a store return does not always line up cleanly with an online order, some will treat that inconsistency as an opportunity rather than an inconvenience.

What Does BORIS Fraud Actually Look Like?

It looks like exploiting whichever side of the transaction is less visible at the moment of return. A customer might return an item in-store that does not quite match the online order, present a different item entirely, or claim a refund against an order the store staff cannot immediately verify without the full ecommerce record in front of them. None of it requires sophistication. It just requires a seam that the retailer has not fully welded shut.

This is the same underlying shape as every fraud we track that hides in a boundary between systems that do not share a full picture. We described the same pattern where a lender sits between the retailer and the customer in BNPL Added a Third Party to Every Dispute, and where the retailer and carrier hold different halves of the delivery story in The Carrier Knows What Happened to Your Parcel. BORIS is the same problem wearing a different uniform: online and in-store, not two businesses, but effectively two systems, each with an incomplete view.

What Each Side Can and Can't See

Laid out plainly, the shape of the gap is easy to see:

The last row matters most. Even a retailer that solves the first three, by fully connecting its own online and in-store systems, still cannot see whether this customer is running the same play at other retailers. Closing the internal seam removes one opportunity. It does not touch the cross-retailer one.

What Would Actually Close the BORIS Gap?

Giving the till the same picture the website has, in real time, and then going further: seeing whether the claimant's pattern shows up elsewhere too. The first part is an integration problem, retailers connecting ecommerce and POS properly so a store return can be checked against the real order instead of a partial record. The second part is the wider network problem behind almost everything we write about, because a channel gap closed at one retailer says nothing about the same customer working the identical gap at the next one.

Solve both, and BORIS goes back to being what it was meant to be: a genuine convenience, not a seam. We describe what that combination of internal visibility and cross-retailer pattern-matching delivers in Fewer False Positives, Faster Claims.

Convenience Built the Gap. Visibility Has to Close It.

BORIS exists because customers wanted it, and retailers were right to build it. The $4 billion in losses is not an argument for taking it away. It is a reminder that every new channel a retailer opens between systems that do not fully talk to each other is a new seam, and seams are exactly where fraud goes looking.

The fix was never going to be making returns less convenient. It is making the systems on both sides of the counter, and eventually the view across retailers, as connected as the customer experience already promises they are.