The Carrier Knows What Happened to Your Parcel. The Retailer Doesn't.

Somewhere, a delivery driver's scanner recorded the exact moment your parcel was left, the GPS coordinates of the doorstep, and a photo of it sitting there. The proof exists. The problem is that the retailer being asked to refund that parcel almost never gets to see it.

That gap, between what the carrier knows and what the retailer can prove, is where a huge share of post-purchase fraud lives. Item not received claims account for as much as two-thirds of all abuse-related losses, according to Riskified. It is the biggest single line in refund fraud, and it turns on a piece of evidence the retailer usually cannot reach.

What Is Item Not Received Fraud?

Item not received fraud is when a customer falsely claims a delivered parcel never arrived, in order to win a refund or a chargeback. It is the most damaging form of post-purchase abuse: Riskified reports that 55% of merchants rank INR abuse their most serious policy-abuse concern, and 93% name it the primary driver of their abuse-related write-offs.

The reason it works is not that the fraud is clever. It is that the claim is almost impossible to disprove from the retailer's chair. The parcel left the warehouse, the tracking said delivered, and then a customer says it never came. Without the delivery evidence, the retailer is refunding on the customer's word, and the customer knows it.

Why Are INR Disputes So Hard to Win?

Because winning one requires proof of delivery, not proof of shipment, and those are two very different things. A retailer can easily show a parcel was dispatched and that tracking marked it delivered. What it usually cannot show is the specific evidence a bank or a customer will accept: where the driver actually was, at what time, and what they left.

That evidence is generated at the doorstep, by the carrier, and it stays there. So the retailer is left arguing a case without its most important exhibit. As Riskified puts it, companies that ship worldwide "lack visibility into their last-mile delivery partners and therefore cannot confidently validate claims." The dispute becomes a standoff, and standoffs, to keep the customer happy, are usually settled in the claimant's favour.

What Does the Carrier Actually Know?

Far more than the retailer resolving the claim. Modern carrier scanners typically capture the GPS coordinates and the exact timestamp of each delivery, and increasingly a proof-of-delivery photo of the parcel at the door. That is a precise, time-stamped record of where a parcel was left and when.

Held up against a claim, that record is often decisive. GPS showing the driver stationary at the delivery address during the delivery window is strong evidence a parcel was delivered as recorded. The carrier is, in effect, holding the answer to almost every INR dispute. The catch is who gets to see it.

Why Doesn't That Reach the Retailer?

Because the carrier and the retailer operate as separate islands of data, and nothing automatically connects them at the moment a claim is raised. The delivery proof lives in the carrier's systems, built for the carrier's own operations, not piped back to the retailer's claims team when they need it.

So the two parties end up resolving a dispute with no shared source of truth. The retailer knows what it shipped. The carrier knows what happened at the door. The customer sits in the middle making a claim that neither can quickly confirm or deny. This is structural, and it is industry-wide. No major carrier routinely feeds delivery intelligence back to retailers for claim resolution, which means the single most useful fact in an INR dispute is the one fact the decision-maker does not have.

What the Retailer Sees vs What the Carrier Holds

The imbalance is easiest to see side by side:

Everything a retailer needs to resolve the claim with confidence sits in the right-hand column, out of reach. That is not a modelling problem. It is a connection problem.

What Would Close the Gap?

Connecting the carrier's delivery evidence back to the retailer at the moment a claim is made. When the fact of what happened at the door informs the claim decision, an INR dispute stops being a matter of who is more persuasive and becomes a matter of what actually occurred.

There is a second half to it, too. Even perfect delivery data for one parcel does not tell a retailer whether this claimant makes the same claim everywhere. Seeing a claimant's behaviour across many retailers, alongside the delivery evidence, is what separates the genuinely unlucky customer from the serial INR abuser. We wrote about that cross-retailer blind spot in The Serial Returner No Single Shop Can See, and about how organised operators exploit it in Refund Fraud Is Organised Now.

Put the two together, the delivery truth and the cross-retailer view, and the genuine customer and the abuser stop looking the same. The honest customer whose parcel really was lost gets refunded fast, because the evidence supports them. The serial abuser meets a decision backed by what actually happened. We describe what that changes for a claims team in Fewer False Positives, Faster Claims.

The Standoff Nobody Wins

Today, the INR dispute is a game with no good outcome. Refuse a genuine claim and you lose a customer and invite a chargeback. Approve a false one and you have paid a fraudster and taught them the claim works. The retailer guesses, because the evidence that would settle it sits one company away.

The strange part is that the proof already exists. A driver's scanner captured it at the doorstep. The whole problem is that the retailer being asked to pay has never been able to see it. Close that gap, and two-thirds of abuse-related losses stop being a standoff and start being a decision.