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The underground world of credit card network exploitation

chargebackstop.com

51–60 of 280 posts

Re: The underground world of credit card network exploitation

#51

Why does the US still accept hand-typed cards? My friend had a USB smartcard reader in like 2001. He'd dip his AmEx to perform a transaction on his PC. It's twenty years later and the industry still hasn't caught up? What's different about Europe that they seem to have figured this out decades ago?

I've lived in Europe my whole life and I've never made an online payment with a card reader (even though my ThinkPad has one), or know anyone who has.

[deleted]

Re: The underground world of credit card network exploitation

#52
post #25

If you are a foreign company accepting payments from the USA, you should simply expect this as a cost of doing business. Credit card fraud here is socialized. The end consumer is never liable, and so we don't bother with chip and pin, 2FA, 3D secure or whatever else. If we notice a suspicious transaction we simply tap a button in the bank's app and the charge is reversed in minutes. Banks and payments processors are…

And that is in addition to the outrageous fees CC companies charge merchants. In the US it's typically around 2% of the transaction! The EU caps it at 0.3% maximum, which still seems like a lot when you consider how much money they move. That's another cost that gets socialized and passed on to the consumer of course, even shoppers who pay cash have to pay for this through higher prices. People should know btw that w…

> With phone 2FA all that needs to happen is you have your phone and wallet stolen.

Are device passcode and app biometrics insufficient security measures in the event of device theft?

Re: The underground world of credit card network exploitation

#53
post #25

If you are a foreign company accepting payments from the USA, you should simply expect this as a cost of doing business. Credit card fraud here is socialized. The end consumer is never liable, and so we don't bother with chip and pin, 2FA, 3D secure or whatever else. If we notice a suspicious transaction we simply tap a button in the bank's app and the charge is reversed in minutes. Banks and payments processors are…

And that is in addition to the outrageous fees CC companies charge merchants. In the US it's typically around 2% of the transaction! The EU caps it at 0.3% maximum, which still seems like a lot when you consider how much money they move. That's another cost that gets socialized and passed on to the consumer of course, even shoppers who pay cash have to pay for this through higher prices. People should know btw that w…

Wild idea: What if secure digital payment was a public service.

Re: The underground world of credit card network exploitation

#54

Why does the US seem so far behind when it comes to banking? - Chip and PIN has been in the UK since 2004 and mandatory since 2006. It wasn't until a decade later that the US caught up. - Faster Payments allow for instant bank transfers (usually) between any bank account for free. Receiving transfers from clients in US (even with a US Wise bank account) was always a nightmare. - Since the EU introduced Strong Custome…

We have 3D Secure, but it's almost never implemented on sites!

Re: The underground world of credit card network exploitation

#55

Why does the US seem so far behind when it comes to banking? - Chip and PIN has been in the UK since 2004 and mandatory since 2006. It wasn't until a decade later that the US caught up. - Faster Payments allow for instant bank transfers (usually) between any bank account for free. Receiving transfers from clients in US (even with a US Wise bank account) was always a nightmare. - Since the EU introduced Strong Custome…

A massively diverse and deregulated banking sector.

The US has literally thousands of small regional banks across 50 fairly independent states.

Rolling out major new technologies in that environment is far far harder.

Re: The underground world of credit card network exploitation

#56
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why I see this type of invalid speculation so often. The author already responded that they reviewed the script and didn't post any sensitive data, so won't add more to that. I'd just state that tons of us use ChatGPT effectively and never blindly trust the outputs - for me ChatGPT is a starting point, not the final product. We're not all so daft as that lawyer who cut and pasted hallucinated case refere…

100% agreed, this is how I always treat it and working on the problem from the article was not an exception from this rule. I share minimum input, and never trust the output blindly. It gets 50-60% of work done, and a really good basis for me to work on it. Especially when working with one-off, end-to-end relatively short scripts.

This has been my primary use case as well (usually for writing some scripts or where I need to solve an operational task quickly), and ChatGPT has saved me a ton of time with those tasks.

Re: The underground world of credit card network exploitation

#58
post #5
post #2

Isn't this solved with 3-D Secure ? Many websites (at least in the EU) implement it and if mandatory, it's impossible to buy something without 2FA (either by SMS, phone app, ...)

"banks (usually American ones) will happily accept transactions that have incorrect full name, invalid CVV / CVC, wrong expiration date, only partial billing address provided, with incorrect ZIP code. All of the above is still not enough to trigger a 3D secure authorisation" The solution indeed is to write manual rules to trigger 3D secure.

Even more funny is that in USA, the actual amount charged to the card is mutable. Take for example when you go to a restaurant and give your card, it's charged, and then you write out with a pen a tip amount, which at some future point gets added on to your charge.

Re: The underground world of credit card network exploitation

#59
post #2

Isn't this solved with 3-D Secure ? Many websites (at least in the EU) implement it and if mandatory, it's impossible to buy something without 2FA (either by SMS, phone app, ...)

We're talking about an industry who proudly announced instant bank to bank payments last week like 2003 has just arrived in the colonises.

Don't expect speed or creativity in the US banking sector.

Re: The underground world of credit card network exploitation

#60

What was most surprising about this is not the fact that there is a group of people exploiting Stripe’s payments, but that the author had ChatGPT write a script to automatically handle payments processing, specifically for chargebacks. And based on the context in the article, the author sounds like they lacked the technical skill to write or validate these scripts themselves. This author is jumping out of the frying…

> the author had ChatGPT write a script to automatically handle payments processing, specifically for chargebacks

Feels like a mischaracterization tbh.

He had it make a script to go through and accept the chargebacks for these accounts, not handle payment processing or do anything to the chargebacks other than click "accept" essentially.

> And based on the context in the article, the author sounds like they lacked the technical skill to write or validate these scripts themselves.

I also don't really get where you're getting that from.

The author even said

> I reviewed all of the scripts carefully, and also never shared any customer data, IDs, or API keys. I think I saved at least a couple hours compared to hand-rolling these tools manually!

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