181–190 of 479 posts
But what do the credit card companies get out of this arrangement? It seems like they’re taking on a whole lot of unnecessary risk and enabling these scams by allowing third party gift cards to be purchased using a credit card.
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> Steam versions of the same game (e.g. Skyrim) often require Steam to be running and enforce mandatory updates that aren't always desirable with no rollback ability. Yeah, but that's a developer choice. Steam doesn't force anyone to use their API for things like that. If that's a concern for someone as a gamer, they should probably support the companies that don't do it no matter the platform, not blame Steam for it…
The original question was "how do you know these things before you buy the game?" My answer was "You could buy from a provider that advertises non-use of DRM like GOG." Whether it's a developer choice is irrelevant. GOG tells you the information you need for your purchasing decision, so if you want to know what you're buying, buy from somewhere like GOG. Also, don't assume that because it's DRM-free on GOG, it is als…
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At the scale these companies operate and the number of actual scammers they block because of their 0 - 100 policies, I can see how they got there. I bet all of us have had the luck (?) of out card being blocked because someone out there was able to get a hold of the credentials. Collateral damage like this, as devastating as it is to the individual, is probably a drop in the bucket for the company. I'm not excusing t…
It's not just corporate policy, it's regulatory requirements in the US. You must block financial activity, and you must not communicate any details to the customer, upon reasonable suspicion of money laundering activity. There's a process and a prescribed timeline for getting things resolved. There is no penalty for a false positive, but there are large penalties for false negatives. Having watched hundreds of these…
The real problem is that companies do not offer any accessible, powerful, and intelligent customer support. Even if they have real humans to talk to, they simply follow a script. Those agents do not have the ability to investigate a situation or the power to use their discretion to take meaningful action. We should impose, by law, the following rules on all companies that offer accounts to their customers. 1. If they…
I don’t want to minimize the pain people experience here, but it’s worth calling out just how hard this problem is for retailers and issuers. Gift cards are the #1 fraud vector in payments ... because it lets stolen cards be converted into a cash-like equivalent with zero traceability. So fraud/risk system are highly sensitive to gift cards. It's not an excuse, but I see in this thread people minimizing the problem a…
Then they are free to stop offering gift cards.
The real problem is that companies do not offer any accessible, powerful, and intelligent customer support. Even if they have real humans to talk to, they simply follow a script. Those agents do not have the ability to investigate a situation or the power to use their discretion to take meaningful action. We should impose, by law, the following rules on all companies that offer accounts to their customers. 1. If they…
If this happens more than a few times, they will quickly remember why customer support is necessary.
Would checking the Apple gift card balance first be a useful precaution? Would it have saved Paris all this hassle? Seems like this might be a necessary step if checking the balance would reveal there's something wrong with the card. Would be frustrating to see the $500 card is worthless but better than risking the bureaucratic hell.
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"Harvesting user data" doesn't make money. The reason people think this is that on HN people have main character syndrome that makes them think their personal data is interesting, plus an assumption that making money is evil therefore anything you can think of that is evil would make money. (Google and Facebook don't make money by "harvesting" or "selling" user data, they make webpages you spend a lot of time on then…
No, I think the reason people on HN think this is because Apple, Google and Microsoft have all been caught harvesting user data: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
Related: there is a known scam where someone will ask for payment by things like Ebay gift cards. To "prove you have the card", you are asked to read off just the last few digits of the card - which unbeknownst to the intended victim is actually all that is needed to redeem the card. You can reliably reconstruct a SSN that is missing the first digits, if you know where the person lived when they filed for it, but tha…
I'm not following. If things have gotten this far, the victim has already been duped into buying the card and intends to send it to the scammers anyway... ?
But also, how could the card possibly work that way? What are the other digits even for; and wouldn't they quickly run out of valid "last few digit" combinations for issued cards?
I don’t want to minimize the pain people experience here, but it’s worth calling out just how hard this problem is for retailers and issuers. Gift cards are the #1 fraud vector in payments ... because it lets stolen cards be converted into a cash-like equivalent with zero traceability. So fraud/risk system are highly sensitive to gift cards. It's not an excuse, but I see in this thread people minimizing the problem a…
And yet they continue to sell these cards. Why? It's simple: they're essentially free money. The worst case for them is that the recipient of the card uses the full amount of the card. In that case, the issuer "only" makes the full profit on those sales. Often they do better: the card is used partially or not at all, then lost or forgotten about. You can see how lucrative they are by looking at promotions. You can of…
The merchant wants you to use the card, in all cases, always. Because statistically, you are likely to spend 30-40% more than the card face value, when you do.
The unused portion of the card sits on the merchant's balance sheet as a liability, for years, until they decide to recognize it as revenue ("breakage"). They prefer this over NOT selling a GC, of course, and some merchants (e.g. Starbucks, high volume, low ticket) make a ton of money on breakage. But in all cases, merchants greatly prefer their cards to be used.
You're also wrong about how the fraud works. Usually, the card is not purchased but sniffed prior to legitimate sale. The mechanisms for this vary, but a common method is to literally pull armloads of cards off of display shelves, open and repackage the carriers, then surreptitiously return to shelves for legitimate sale. This is purportedly the process for large organized crime rings based in Asia, mostly China.
And you're wrong about how easy it would be to fix. Packaging costs money, retailers have to be on board for activation, this has to be integrated into POS systems, and it all has to be very easy for consumers.
This is a hard problem at scale, and smart and motivated people on the merchant side, the program manager side, the bank side, and the law enforcement side, would love a simple solution.
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What is not a hard problem, though, is that Apple should separate "AML investigation in process" from the user's ability to access their own data. This would turn a very large problem (for all involved) into an annoying inconvenience (for the customer).