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Square Cash

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Re: Square Cash

#131

Post by philfreo »

nfoz wrote: post #108
newhouseb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently, for suspicious activity, they'll send you an email back confirming the transaction. I would hope that most large-scale modern email services somehow sign emails to vouch for their authenticity to avoid email spoofing. I'd be curious how they handle dumb senders (I'd assume with a verification every time).

> I would hope that most large-scale modern email services somehow sign emails to vouch for their authenticity to avoid email spoofing. Wait, what? I don't think that is a thing.

There is such a thing (lookup DKIM) but it's really only one factor of email authenticity and I'm sure Square isn't fully relying on it.

Re: Square Cash

#132

Post by jrockway »

prezjordan wrote: post #37
sahaskatta wrote: post #16

Hmm neat, however what benefits do I get using this when it's also built into Gmail and provided directly by Google Wallet? http://www.google.com/wallet/send-money/

Gmail "Send Money" charges a fee of 2.9% for people who don't use Google Wallet.

Not true. We only charge the sender to send from a credit card. If you send from a bank account or from the funds that you've already received, it's free.

Re: Square Cash

#134

Post by jrockway »

chadcf wrote: post #71
sahaskatta wrote: post #16

Hmm neat, however what benefits do I get using this when it's also built into Gmail and provided directly by Google Wallet? http://www.google.com/wallet/send-money/

Is that actually widely available? They announced it a long time ago but it has yet to ever show up in my gmail.

It's still in slow rollout stage. If you want to try it now, I'll send you a cent and it should be enabled for you. (You must be in the US, read the TOS, etc.)

Re: Square Cash

#135

Post by philfreo »

jser wrote: post #51
philfreo wrote: post #28

This is my favorite type of product. Here's why: - Take an existing known medium (in this case email) and makes it way more useful. - They didn't try to build a bunch of new UI for connecting your Facebook so you can find and invite and pay your friends, paying out to your card, etc. - It magically hides the messiness of an enormously complex problem (fraud, different types of debit cards & banks all over the world)…

Looks like an excellent target for phishing attacks!

So is PayPal and just about every other financial institution. Square has some nice safeguards in place here and considering they are going to be the ones paying for fraud abuse, you can be sure they'll be doing everything possible to prevent it.

Re: Square Cash

#136

Post by cstrat »

jser wrote: post #44
jey wrote: post #32

They're obviously taking a loss on this (due to credit card fees) if the recipient gets the full amount sent. So this must be a loss-leader that's building up to something else where they expect to make a ton of money. That "something" is most likely just "replacing cash and cards", but will be interesting to see how it plays out. It's a bold move regardless. EDIT: I meant debit card transaction fees, not credit card…

I believe that Amazon Payments is the only system that lets you pay someone with a credit card, although it's limited to $1,000/month (otherwise people abuse it, sending cash to each other to rack up points on their credit cards).

I thought that there were now ways for payment processors to flag that a transaction is not supposed to earn points? (eg. balance transfers, cash withdrawals etc...)

Otherwise I could deposit $10,000 from my credit card into my on-line gambling wallet, then withdraw it, repeat...

Re: Square Cash

#137

Post by aioprisan »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #130
aioprisan wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, you can't just take funds out. How would you do that, counterfeit a check and commit fraud by cashing it in? The bank ATMs/teller machines would reject that check and you'd find yourself in prison very quickly.

You use the system backing check processing, ACH. Theoretically, this is similar to counterfeiting a check, except: - these are electronic requests, so there's nothing to distinguish "genuine" from "fraudulent" ones - you really do have all of the information that goes into an ACH payment Really, it's much more similar to forging a check than to counterfeiting one.

What service allows you to specify a debit from an account that's not authorized, in hte US? No bank that I've even used provides that, nor does an online service or API without first authorizing a debit via ACH with the deposit confirmation.

Re: Square Cash

#138

Post by rafekett »

seanharper wrote: post #82
seanharper wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not using ACH for this, but rather probably using the PIN-debit networks such as star, interlink, nyce and accel.

There is actually the capability to do an instant transfer over visa and mastercard networks as well, but it is somewhat expensive (>0.20) -- the pin debit networks are smaller and more willing to negotiate this sort of thing, and since most debit cards are able to process on more than one pin debit network you can get 100% coverage with just a couple of the pin debit networks playing ball. That they are not allowing…

> That they are not allowing this for credit cards indicates that they are using the pin debit networks.

not necessarily. you can't think of any other reasons why they'd do this?

Re: Square Cash

#140

Post by jervisfm »

ketralnis wrote: post #47
Tomdarkness wrote: post #33

This is one area where the US seems to be behind compared to the UK. I am from the UK and that service would look quite poor if it launched over here. We have a system called faster payments service that offers instant (although in some cases up to 2 hours) bank transfers for payments up to £100,000 (can differ between banks). You can use this directly if you share bank account numbers and sort codes but there are al…

The US equivalent is ACH, which has the major downside that using only the bank ID (routing number) and account number you can effectively wipe out the target's account. It's up to your bank (or whatever ACH proxy) to keep you from doing that, not to the interchange, both legally and technically. ACH also takes several days to work, and has a wide window for either bank to declare the transfer fraudulent, so many ban…

> The US equivalent is ACH, which has the major downside that using only the bank ID (routing number) and account number you can effectively wipe out the target's account

Interesting. I had come to a similar conclusion myself. I noticed that in paying my school fees all I needed was those two numbers (banking routing #, bank acct #) for payment with no further verification. As you have observed all of these details are readily available on paper checks.

One way to mitigate the issue of someone potentially wiping your account is to have two accounts. One public and one private. The private one would contain (most of) your actual funds whilst the public account, which you would share freely as needed would contain just enough funds to complete whatever transactions that you need to do. Sure, it is not as convenient because you have to manage two accounts but at least that way you reduce your exposure to your funds being completely depleted.

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