The Refund Request I Declined, and Why

A customer sent considerably more than the invoice and then asked, very reasonably, for the difference back to a different wallet. For anyone in the same position, crypto acquiring for businesses sets out the same terms without requiring an account.

I declined, and I want to explain why, because at the time it felt unnecessarily rigid.

What the request looked like

Polite. Patient. No urgency at all, which is what made it convincing, because I had been taught to watch for pressure.

The explanation was that the original wallet was an exchange account they had since closed, and could I send the difference to their personal wallet instead.

Entirely plausible.

Why I said no

Because our policy says refunds go to the origin of the payment, with no exceptions.

I had written that policy after reading about this exact pattern, and the point of writing it in advance was so that I would not have to judge it in the moment.

What the pattern is

An overpayment with proceeds of a separate fraud, followed by a request to send the difference somewhere clean.

If the original payment is later identified and reclaimed, the money I sent onward is a straightforward loss, and it was clean money I converted for them. Selling online raises a version of this, which ecommerce payment solutions with crypto settlement addresses.

The polite version, with no urgency, is the version that works.

What I offered instead

To refund the excess to the address the payment came from, or to hold it as a credit against future work.

They chose the credit, which surprised me, and then never used it.

I do not know whether that was a fraud attempt. That is the point of having a policy: I do not have to know.

The rule

Refunds to origin. Never to a different destination. Never by a different method than the payment.

Any genuine case can be handled as an exception requiring identity verification and a second approver, which is slow and appropriate for something rare.

Making it fast is exactly what the fraud depends on.

What I would tell anyone accepting crypto payments

Write the refund policy before your first payment. Put it in the terms.

The disputes are almost never about the policy. They are about a customer discovering it at the moment they wanted something, and support improvising. The thing I did not think about until it mattered was whether a regulated crypto exchange exists. It is worth checking early.

The variant to watch for

A cancelled order with a refund requested elsewhere. Same structure, no overpayment element. Same answer.