Your courier said "weather delay." It didn't rain.

A Non-Delivery Report is supposed to mean the courier tried and failed: customer unavailable, address not found, weather delay. The merchant pays for the failed attempt either way — and almost nobody checks whether the attempt actually happened.

We checked.

In a 12-month audit of one Mumbai D2C operation's real shipment data (~1,900 resolved shipments, 2,900+ NDR events), our engine flagged 293 delivery attempts as fake — backed by evidence, not vibes. Three patterns did most of the work:

1. Weather claims vs. rainfall records

Couriers logged "weather delay" on days where IMD-grade rainfall archives showed 0.0mm of rain at that exact pincode. Not light rain. Zero.

2. Impossible timestamps

Multiple "customer unavailable" attempts logged at the identical second. A field agent cannot ring twelve doorbells simultaneously.

3. Reason flip-flops

The same shipment cycling through "address not found" → "customer refused" → "address not found" across attempts. If the address was found on attempt two, it didn't vanish by attempt three.

Each flagged attempt ships with its evidence: the rainfall record, the timestamp cluster, the contradiction trail. That evidence becomes a dispute the merchant can actually win — in this audit, ₹38,000+ in reclaimable freight from a single brand's lanes.

The uncomfortable part: the couriers our engine caught most often were not the ones the merchant's ops team suspected. Human intuition watches the loudest courier. The data watches all of them.

Want this run on your own shipments? The free 7-day audit does exactly this — CSV in, evidence out.