I wonder how would Balanced Payments deal with 'item not as described' fraud
Something that happened with me here:
Nothing is certain, except death and taxes .. and chargebacks
51–60 of 69 posts
Re: Nothing is certain, except death and taxes .. and chargebacks
#52That's super weird- I had my first chargeback today, from a customer who didn't even attempt to get in touch and ask for a refund... apparently this is quite common!
Not common, standard. Having the customer contact you isn't a frequent occurrence, depending on where you do business. The British do not wish to talk to you, they assume that you're the one trying to defraud them by default. Swedes will pretty much never do charge backs.
It always fascinates me when the global nature of software uncovers quirky cultural differences.
Re: Nothing is certain, except death and taxes .. and chargebacks
#53I would actually be interested in knowing how others deal with a certain type of fraud. We currently have an issue where someone is using stolen credit cards to buy "digital goods". We in the UK and Scandinavia, so we started out blocking purchases of digital goods from the UK. Fraud goes to zero right away. The fraudsters moves to using stolen UK credit cards in Denmark, via a large number of Danish IPs, fine... We'…
I'm interested in your view that 3DS and VbV are "very American and not at all what European customers expect to see".
Although generally payment methods are quite diverse across Europe, I'd say in places like here in the UK it is now fairly common to get the secondary confirmation prompts when purchasing on-line, certainly from smaller businesses. They also seem to be fairly smart about when they just let it go through without troubling the user these days, e.g., low value regular payments to the same vendor don't seem to ask me for any confirmation most of the time recently, but payments to new vendors often do.
Is this not your experience as well?
Re: Nothing is certain, except death and taxes .. and chargebacks
#54Use digital cash- no chargebacks, no middlemen. The best option today if you don't want chargebacks is adopting Bitcoin for payments (like how Reddit did for Reddit Gold with Coinbase). http://blog.coinbase.com/post/40131065845/hosted-payment-pag...
As a customer, why would I want to do that?
Other than a few big names I have a lot less than absolute trust in online vendors, so I find the chargeback facility very reassuring
Re: Nothing is certain, except death and taxes .. and chargebacks
#55I would actually be interested in knowing how others deal with a certain type of fraud. We currently have an issue where someone is using stolen credit cards to buy "digital goods". We in the UK and Scandinavia, so we started out blocking purchases of digital goods from the UK. Fraud goes to zero right away. The fraudsters moves to using stolen UK credit cards in Denmark, via a large number of Danish IPs, fine... We'…
Preventing fraud is impossible, but you can minimize it to very low levels with a combination of filters, some of which you mentioned. This includes geo distance, public Email address, velocity, size of transaction and most important - proxy detection. The use of a public anonymous proxy is a very high indicator of fraud.
We use minfraud, a service that takes all of those parameters as input, and uses a huge database of previous fraud to return the probability the transaction is fraud. It has worked exceedingly well to prevent almost all fraud on our marketplace.
I wrote in detail about this process about half a year ago - http://www.binpress.com/blog/2012/07/31/fighting-online-frau...
Re: Nothing is certain, except death and taxes .. and chargebacks
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not stopped, but it would decrease fraud, as the fraction of payments made in bitcoins is guaranteed to be impossible to charge back. As this fraction increases, fraud is reduced further and further. It would be interesting to have a payment platform that evaluates the trustworthiness of a customer right before payment (based on factors such as customer history, shipping address matching the billing address...), and…
Wouldn't the fraction of people paying with Bitcoin be a subset of the people that didn't commit fraud with credit cards? You're just moving a very small number of honest buyers from credit cards to Bitcoin. You not going to have a person not defraud you because you provided the option of Bitcoins. If you have transaction that you deem risky, require a bank transfer, that will make it easier for the criminals to go c…
Cash has no chargebacks, which is why merchants will often offer a small discount for using cash (or charge a .50 fee) when using a credit card. Bitcoin is just like cash, but digital. Some merchants even offer discounts for customers who use bitcoins since the risk is mitigated, as with physical cash.
Re: Nothing is certain, except death and taxes .. and chargebacks
#57I wonder how would Balanced Payments deal with 'item not as described' fraud Something that happened with me here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4867484
Hey there, I'll ping npcomplete to answer this one. He has some thoughts on "item not as described" fraud.
Re: Nothing is certain, except death and taxes .. and chargebacks
#58I would actually be interested in knowing how others deal with a certain type of fraud. We currently have an issue where someone is using stolen credit cards to buy "digital goods". We in the UK and Scandinavia, so we started out blocking purchases of digital goods from the UK. Fraud goes to zero right away. The fraudsters moves to using stolen UK credit cards in Denmark, via a large number of Danish IPs, fine... We'…
(I work for balanced, I wrote the blog and handle fraud)
I am sorry you had to deal with this.
Of course, we look at all other signals and of course we use machine learning. What I posted was partial information. the list by no means is complete. When dealing with opening up on fraud, you deal with two conflicting things - (1) If you open your algorithms/data and make it completely open source, the fraudsters have all the access as you do and (2) If you shut down all access and keep it closed, there's no exchange of information. Most payment processors opt for (2), we really wanted to strike a middle ground. If I can't expose the fact '@apple.com' email address is more trustworthy than a throwaway email address and regard this piece of information as the bed rock of fraud protection, I am nuts. Summary: you expose something, gain knowledge, hide the rest.
There are several more signals we look at when dealing with fraud (esp. digital goods). We have built a machine learning system that has learned (is learning) from our data. We also built visualization layers on top of that. Send us an email at support@balancedpayments.com and I will provide more information.
Re: Nothing is certain, except death and taxes .. and chargebacks
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're telling me you've crowdsourced your editing for marketing materials? Tell me you're not serious.
It's just part of being an open company, read more here: http://blog.gittip.com/post/26350459746/the-first-open-compa... We crowdsource feedback for a lot of things we do @ Balanced. For example, we've openly discussed pricing ( https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/48 ), etc. Everything's on https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api . We're trying a different approach to payments, for once. Openness and tra…
:D
Re: Nothing is certain, except death and taxes .. and chargebacks
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry about that! Just did a proofread for obvious errors and I think I got them all. I'm omw out now, but I'll take another look when I get back. It's open source, you're welcome to contribute a fix: https://github.com/balanced/balanced.github.com/blob/master/...
You're telling me you've crowdsourced your editing for marketing materials? Tell me you're not serious.
This makes me incredibly happy. 8^D