This document outlines the official Judge.me process for suspending merchant accounts and preventing fraudulent activity.
1. Grounds for investigation and suspension
Judge.me initiates internal reviews and potential enforcement actions when a merchant is suspected of violating platform rules or engaging in fraudulent or abusive behavior. Triggers may include:
Use of Judge.me for Spam or Phishing: Misuse of our email infrastructure to send unsolicited or malicious emails.
Review Manipulation or Fabrication: Attempting to fabricate reviews, including automated/fake submissions.
Excessive Review Requests: Unusual email sending behavior, especially for new or unverified merchants, which may indicate abuse or bot-like activity.
External Reports: Verified complaints submitted by consumers, regulatory bodies, or partner platforms such as Shopify regarding fraudulent store behavior.
2. Detection and monitoring mechanisms
A. Automated monitoring
AI-Powered Template Analysis: All review request email templates undergo AI-based analysis to detect phishing, deceptive content, or unusual formatting patterns.
Rate Limiting Based on Merchant Trust Score: Judge.me maintains a dynamic trust scoring mechanism for stores. Suspicious stores face stricter limits on the number and frequency of email sends.
Spam/Abuse Pattern Detection: Systems continuously monitor sending velocity, bounce rates, complaint ratios, and behavioral anomalies.
B. Manual investigation
Reports of fraud or abuse trigger manual investigations by Judge.me’s Support teams.
Investigations include review of:
Email content and delivery logs
Review submission patterns
Merchant store metadata and usage history
Merchants may be contacted to provide clarification or documentation during the review process.
3. Enforcement protocol
Judge.me applies a tiered enforcement framework to ensure that policy violations are addressed with appropriate and proportionate measures. The enforcement process escalates based on the severity, frequency, and credibility of the identified issue.
When a violation is suspected or detected, Judge.me may impose functional restrictions on the merchant's account. These may include, but are not limited to, temporary suspension of review requests and automated review collection features, pending the outcome of an internal investigation.
In cases involving serious or deliberate misconduct—such as confirmed fraudulent activity, phishing, spam, or manipulation of reviews—Judge.me reserves the right to fully suspend or permanently terminate the merchant’s account. This measure is only taken when there is clear, documented evidence of a violation and after a comprehensive internal review has been conducted.
All enforcement decisions are logged in detail and subject to internal oversight to ensure fairness, transparency, and consistency. In addition, when fraudulent activity is confirmed, Judge.me reports the merchant to Shopify through their official abuse escalation process to support broader enforcement at the platform level.
4. How we handle violations
Accounts that violate our terms—such as engaging in spam, phishing, or fraudulent review activity—may be suspended. We keep a detailed internal record of each case, including timestamps, investigator notes, evidence snapshots, and correspondence history.
5. Collaboration with platform partners
Judge.me actively collaborates with platform partners—particularly Shopify—to uphold trust and integrity across the e-commerce ecosystem. While Judge.me maintains its own prohibited behavior policy and enforces it within the scope of our services, broader enforcement actions, such as full store suspension or closure, fall under the exclusive jurisdiction of the platform provider.
Shopify operates a centralized trust and safety infrastructure and is solely responsible for determining whether a merchant store should be suspended or closed due to fraudulent activity, excessive chargebacks, terms of service violations, or other risk factors. Judge.me does not have access to the full behavioral, transactional, or operational data available to Shopify—such as order legitimacy, payment activity, fulfillment performance, or buyer dispute histories.
To support this broader infrastructure, Judge.me monitors merchant behavior within the boundaries of our app and flags accounts to Shopify when there is credible evidence or well-founded suspicion of abuse—such as spam, phishing, or fraudulent activity related to review collection or email practices. This collaborative process helps ensure that Shopify’s enforcement teams are informed of merchants who may pose a risk to the broader ecosystem.
In parallel, Judge.me enforces its own internal policies. If a store is closed by Shopify or flagged as high-risk by their trust and safety team, Judge.me automatically suspends its review collection services for that store and may apply further platform-specific enforcement actions to prevent misuse.
Judge.me also investigates substantiated complaints received from consumers or regulatory authorities. When such reports reveal violations of platform rules or legal obligations, we may escalate those cases to Shopify through their official abuse reporting channels.
6. Policy governance
Judge.me’s fraud detection policies are reviewed semi-annually.
We assess emerging fraud vectors, industry best practices, and compliance frameworks (including FTC and EU directives).
Updates to our fraud and enforcement protocols are reflected in internal documentation, merchant-facing terms, and product behavior.
Contact us
For policy-related inquiries or enforcement appeals, please contact support@judge.me. We're available 24/7.