Countering Refund Abuse and the Future of Customer Experience
- January 21, 2026
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- 11 min read
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Jordan Shamir is the CEO and co-founder of Yofi, a refund abuse prevention solution recently acquired by the anti-fraud vendor No Fraud. Before establishing Yofi, Shamir acquired nearly half a decade in Product Management experience working for IBM.
In this Fraudbeat interview, we ask Jordan what motivated him to found Yofi and accept the acquisition offer from No Fraud. Towards the end of the interview, Jordan also looks into the future of the retail fulfilment experience and what’s coming with loyalty in the agentic commerce era. The interview has been condensed and edited for length and meaning. For the full-length interview click on the embedded video or go to Fraudbeat’s Youtube channel here.
Ronen Shnidman: When, and more importantly, why did you found Yofi?
Jordan Shamir: So I have two other co-founders, Alex and Andrew. Alex is actually my sister. And Alex and Andrew were in charge of the bot mitigation and policy abuse team at Nike. Right. That’s where they actually met, fighting bots and, you know, policy abusers at Nike. While at Nike, they used a variety of different payment fraud prevention companies, but ended up seeing that the future of fraud was actually moving more to post-purchase and customer support. What we ended up founding is a company that addresses customer support, which is getting bombarded with questions like, hey, my item was missing, it never arrived. I put on a pair of shoes and I went on a run for the first time and it ripped.
And while typically a fraud team will have a handful of people, customer service will have hundreds of people on their team. And customer service can override any fraud rule, but also more importantly, any customer complaint can be fraud. It’s just harder and harder to detect because you don’t have the visibility to know when people are taking advantage of your policies. What we end up seeing is post purchase fraud is very subjective where, like, payment fraud is very objective. Right? Someone stole your credit card, someone’s doing a chargeback. This is a lot more subjective and depends on what a brand classifies as fraud or abuse.
RS: I’m not a sneaker head, but I think everyone has had fraud issues that they’ve dealt with at some point. And I always feel when I talk to someone on the other end like they are trying to suss me out, to see if I’m reporting fraud or trying to actually commit fraud or abuse. I feel tense when I talk to the customer service people. So how do you address CX issues while still handling abuse?
JS: I think the first step is just providing visibility because it’s not a question of whether abuse is happening. It’s just how bad is the abuse happening at your brand.
RS: And then if you’re trying to keep a good customer experience, I guess you’re saying it’s about defining what is a good customer experience versus what is enabling abuse.
JS: Yeah, and I think the way we think about it is e-commerce right now has been ruled forever by hard coded flows. Everyone gets free returns or no one gets free returns, right? Everyone gets a refund-upon-scan or everyone is refund-upon-inspection. Or maybe, I’m just going to approve every claim that comes through. And what we see is that part of changing the policy mindset is also challenging the notion that everyone deserves the same policy. Not everyone is the same, right? So how do we start designing solutions that actually factor segmentation and personalization into it?
To just give you an example of something that we do with a lot of our brands: A lot of our brands do refunds upon scan, right? So, the moment the item is dropped off at the carrier, the refund is processed. That’s a great customer experience. You have less customer WISMO – where’s my order? Where’s my return? When’s the money back on my credit card, etc. But not everyone deserves that, right? It should be based on different risk scores. So what we do a lot of times is we actually integrate into the return management solution for a lot of our customers and we basically start saying, hey, this subsector of bad actors, we’re going to delay the return or the refund. Maybe we’re going to add a fee, maybe we’re going to disable their ability to do an online return and they have to drop it off at Happy Returns or at a store.
We actually are taking this different notion and starting to create these custom policies while also giving visibility to the customer service agent to know that this person’s also likely going to try to hit you up and do some social engineering to get what they want.
RS: What distinguishes Yofi’s solution from its competitors?
JS: I think one big thing is that we are purpose built. We actually don’t use any information from payments, which is kind of weird when you think about fraud. It’s like we actually don’t care about anything from the payment basis. And we have some really deep integrations into what we do with carriers. We actually integrate directly into customer support tools. We look at things from a semantic layer, we look at image analysis. We integrate with like 360 plus carriers around the globe so we can find different anomalies. We integrate into warehouses because fundamentally what we’re solving is a data silo issue. What is the warehouse saying versus what is customer support saying when they’re talking to the agent?
Something like what we do is very flexible and very customizable, but we’re purpose built for this post purchase experience. The big announcement we had recently is that we’re actually building with Happy Returns and some of our other merchants is actually prevention of drop-off fraud – people dropping off a fake item like a return in-store. The interesting thing that you’re talking about is a lot of payment providers, similar to traditional anti-fraud companies, if it’s in store, they don’t care because the card is present. And the way we’re also thinking about it is that like with abuse and a lot of this post purchase fraud, it happens both online and in store. It’s not just consolidated at the online checkout payment.
So how do we provide this visibility both from an e-commerce perspective but also from a brick-and-mortar retail perspective. By the way, there’s a lot more sales happening in physical retail than online commerce still.
RS:So, you’re basically an omnichannel solution then
JS:Yeah, 1,000 percent. And let me give you a good example, which is like a manufacturer for electronics.
Say I buy an Xbox at Best Buy and it’s a Microsoft product, right? Hypothetically, I could say, hey, I have an issue. Best Buy would tell me that I can go to the manufacturer. So they might be able to show you a fake receipt that they bought at Amazon or that they bought at Best Buy or something along those lines. And your customer support agent has a lose-lose situation that they need to decide, is this a legitimate claim? Is it not legitimate? Because you don’t have any information about the order outside of the receipt. So what can we do to start taking that information, the tonality of the text, all those interactions, to be able to actually come up with a risk score. Right. So we support clients even with omnichannel warranty fraud.
RS: What was it like recruiting Yofi’s first customers? Was it Nike? I mean, who was the first?
JS: Just on record, we do not work with Nike. I think the first one was tough, man. We ended up sending, I don’t know, hundreds of cold call emails and our first clients were three sneaker stores selling collectibles because when we came out of the gates our name was BotNot. We really focused on collectibles and sneakers and different things like that. And it was hard. We just kept bombarding and sending thousands of emails and hundreds of cold calls. And then eventually people picked up the phone and we were able to provide really quick value and we developed great relationships with our clients.
And I would say, during the first year and even still today now that Yofi has been around for four years, a majority of our success is still referral based. It’s still community based. Someone’s hearing about us and then someone’s recommending us. And I think that’s been a really important thing as an entrepreneur. Two things actually: One is that your clients are not clients, your clients are partners. They want you to be successful and they also want to be involved in the process of solving a pain point that’s annoying them day-to-day, right? So flipping that mentality of like, your early clients are just as good as your employees, if not better. And then the other notion is that you have to build in public, right?
There is the fear that competitors might see it, but execution is everything. So we are an extremely transparent company. We post all the time, on different topics, like how we’re catching things. Like different fraud tactics, we’re seeing, right? Because ultimately ,we have the same universal enemy. Fraudsters are taking advantage of folks across the board, right? We’re happy to work and we do work with people who theoretically are our competitors.
Reasons Behind No Fraud Acquisition
RS: Congratulations on the acquisition of Yofi by No Fraud. It’s still fresh news. And it only took you a couple years to get acquired, so hopefully it’s for good reasons. Why did the acquisition of Yofi make sense for both parties at this time?
JS: We’re really excited. We want to be the industry leader in the space. We have a really big vision that’s CX first and focused on customer intentionality. And the nice thing that No Fraud has is a culture that we really vibed with and loved. We really liked their leadership. We really liked their customers. Their customers said great things and it made sense for us because no fraud is very much a traditional anti-fraud company. They focus on credit cards, they focus on chargebacks, they focus on things very much at the payment level. We never did that. And so by being able to capture what we do pre checkout and post checkout with the fraud layer, we can enhance our data, we can enhance our risk scoring. We can enhance the solutions we provide to clients. We can provide that complete 360 degree view of a client. And it just made sense for us where they had a great distribution and we had the technology.
Personalization in the Agentic Commerce Era
RS: That sounds great and leads to the last question, which is what problems in the retail fulfillment experience are still unsolved in your opinion? What’s still out there?
JS: I think at the high level one of the biggest ones is just like what is personalization? Because personalization goes beyond just saying, “Hi Jordan!” But how do you start moving to truly personalized experiences? One of the things we talked about is can everyone get different return policies, right? Everyone can get different loyalty, right? Like the surprise and delight does not have to be like this overwhelming thing of everything has to be discounted. And I actually believe the future of loyalty is actually being changed and completely going away.
I think about this even from an agentic commerce standpoint where I think like you’re going to have bot to bot based communication. I imagine the agent will be prompted where it’s going to be like, hey Jordan, Alex’s birthday is coming up. Here are the things that we recommend to buy or hey Jordan, you need to go buy a pair of socks. Here’s an option from JD, here’s an option from Foot Locker, here’s an option from Nike. Which one do you prefer?
And how does loyalty play a perspective? And this might be a little counterintuitive, but l like to think what’s going to drive success for brands is going to be the human touch in the customer experience that you put on a digital experience, which is kind of counterintuitive to everyone talking about agentic.
I think the beauty of what agentic or AI can help folks do is actually automating a lot of the tedious, mundane tasks while allowing people to actually really focus on how do you make people feel special? How do you make people feel a connection with the brand or the retail experience that you’re building?
