Is it just me or is everyone getting the impossible to dismiss popup covering the story?
Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
101–110 of 113 posts
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Keep in mind that this is about chargeback risk, First, I do not think this is about chargebacks, at all. I don't know what it is about, but it's not chargebacks. This looks like a blanket revocation of anonymizing/VPN services. That isn't how fraud/risk engines work (note: I wrote several fraud/risk engines for ecommerce/banking/travel industry as well as passive device fingerprinting). Sure, make this a riskier t…
> I can't think of a single thing that is legal to buy that is blanket revoked by some company like this. Firearms. https://www.paypal.com/webapps/helpcenter/article/?solutionI... https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/about?nodeId=6023 https://squareup.com/legal/seller-agreement Also, at least two of those have prohibitions on "occult materials". I'm not quite sure what that means, but it doesn't sound illegal.
A year back, eBay had to ban spells and potions, "as transactions in these categories can be difficult to verify and resolve."
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/08/17/ebay_bans_mag...
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that some users use VPNs for credit card fraud. What I find hard to believe is that the majority of VPN users are committing credit card fraud. If nothing else, it would be difficult for VPNs to make a profit if they had that many chargebacks.
> What I find hard to believe is that the majority of VPN users are committing credit card fraud. The problem isn't the majority. The problem is just a significant amount. Keep in mind how low the chargeback rates need to be to avoid serious penalties. Also, keep in mind the number of people isn't the issue, but it's the number of fraudulent transactions that occur. One person can attempt many. It's an attack vector,…
You seem to be reading more into my comment than I put into it. I'm not saying anything more than I find the original assertion that the majority of VPN users use stolen credit cards to be unlikely.
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claiming that VPNs have more people signing up with stolen credit cards than their own credit cards rather unlikely to me. The penalty fees on the resulting chargeback would make it difficult to make a profit, particularly on a service that competes on price in an increasingly crowded marketplace.
Ah, now I see our problem. As I see it there are three main customer groups for VPNs; people using it to circumvent copyright protections (either location based or outright theft), tech savvy people who want privacy, and bad guys. The original said more bad guys than tech savvy people, I assumed that excluded copyright circumventors (the largest group) and you assumed they were included.
[deleted]
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claiming that VPNs have more people signing up with stolen credit cards than their own credit cards rather unlikely to me. The penalty fees on the resulting chargeback would make it difficult to make a profit, particularly on a service that competes on price in an increasingly crowded marketplace.
Ah, now I see our problem. As I see it there are three main customer groups for VPNs; people using it to circumvent copyright protections (either location based or outright theft), tech savvy people who want privacy, and bad guys. The original said more bad guys than tech savvy people, I assumed that excluded copyright circumventors (the largest group) and you assumed they were included.
You mean that you assumed "tech savvy people" excluded copyright circumventors, while I assumed it did?
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#106Keep in mind that this is about chargeback risk, not implementing some secret government policy. "Anonymizing VPNs" are a high risk service -- the people signing up for them are more often "bad guys" than tech professionals looking for privacy -- and they're signing up with stolen payment information. There are far more hackers, crackers, carders, "script kiddies", spammers and other people that need to hide their lo…
"the people signing up for them are more often "bad guys" than tech professionals looking for privacy" I think this is always a bad argument to make. By that same logic they'd be banning all torrent sites, too, and a lot of other stuff, possibly even Bitcoin. I think these VPN's should sue Mastercard and Visa, just like Wikileaks did, and won. They can't just decide "who is the bad guy" and ban them.
If torrent sites and bitcoin accepted credit card payments, and a significant fraction of those payments involved stolen credit/debit cards (significantly harming the true owners of those cards even with liability protection), merchant account providers should have the right to not do business with them either.
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the people signing up for them are more often "bad guys" than tech professionals looking for privacy Thank you. All we hear about is how the government is trying to silence us and there's some vast payment processor conspiracy trying to stop us from using credit cards, as if they would want to stop us from giving them money. No, HN, the majority of VPN traffic is not innocent nerds accessing Facebook on a public wi…
Just roll your own VPN(s) with EC2 hosts. I have a feeling amazon will not ever get cut off by the processors.
point in fact, we have a version of pfSense coming for EC2
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#108As someone who used to live in a place where using a pay VPN service was the simplest solution to access sites like wikipedia or even gmail (this one was not blocked all the time though), this news does not feel really good. This said, most of my friends there have moved on to using some VPSs for that long ago, and so do I, when I go there to see them. Bitcoin sounds helpful for the ones not willing to use those meth…
I know many services block or negatively rate connections coming from hosting providers. Personally we see that most of the spam attempts are via cheap VPSs. I'm not sure if they actually hack these or simply just purchase a $9/month host, install VPN, and go to work on spam.
Our system keeps track of all netblocks and the companies they belong to and we classify those so our site can take action accordingly. Normally we just alert mods if a new user is created or a new first post is placed by a user originating from one of these hosting companies so it can be checked. Banning access totally from these would leviate some work.
My personal experience has been that access to my site via VPN services or ips belonging to hosting providers, are mostly spammers.
I think that eventually everything will go anonymous and that will make it much harder to detect and filter spam/fraud. It's going to take smarter tools and changes on sites to detect spam/fraud by usage patterns instead of source.
The sad part is that these changes will effect all legit users negatively in order to try to prevent the few bad apples.
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#109You morons. Visa and mastercard are doing you a favor.
Who would pay an anonymizing service with credit card?!
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#110Keep in mind that this is about chargeback risk, not implementing some secret government policy. "Anonymizing VPNs" are a high risk service -- the people signing up for them are more often "bad guys" than tech professionals looking for privacy -- and they're signing up with stolen payment information. There are far more hackers, crackers, carders, "script kiddies", spammers and other people that need to hide their lo…
I'm pretty dismayed to read this. If you regularly connect to random wireless networks in cafes and hotels, you're a moron if you don't connect through a VPN. If you're not connecting through a VPN all your non-SSL/TLS traffic is available for reading for whatever bored cracker has found his way onto the router. Plus, not all sensitive sites implement SSL/TLS and those that do often implement it poorly[1]. . Not to e…
What VPN provider(s) do you recommend?