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Tell HN: Automatic fraud detection is making my life hell

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Re: Tell HN: Automatic fraud detection is making my life hell

#321

Post by MattGaiser »

wormius wrote: post #241
ajb wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it's not acceptable for online providers to converge on making life miserable for "a few percent" of people. This is a market failure: to save the cost of a few bucks, huge costs are imposed on these individuals. The answer is to have some mechanism whereby people who run into these issues can pay ( once ) the small cost of being validated in an alternative way (like, actually talking to a human a…

This is secondary to the main topic, but: The externalization of costs onto customers is something I've noticed hard with the pandemic. Going to get medication at the pharmacy while fewer and fewer people worked and hours were closed, and finding out after the pandemic it's shitty still with multiple pharmacy chains having workers walk out and protest these conditions. As a customer - waiting in line for a refill can…

How is the fix for this not an online pharmacy? The only reason I use an in person pharmacy is credit card points as it codes as grocery.

Re: Tell HN: Automatic fraud detection is making my life hell

#322

Post by MattGaiser »

k8svet wrote: post #113

I have such immense disdain for Capital One and MasterCard for how they implement 3DS. I have been in Germany for 6 weeks. I have spent thousands of dollars between flights, train tickets, and hotels. Guess what I have to do every, single, time I buy a 3EUR train ticket? Receive an SMS on my American cellphone number. Their "solution" is to have a family member in the US add their number to my account, wake up in the…

Wouldn't you pay far less for roaming fees than $1000 for the short periods you are out of the country?

Re: Tell HN: Automatic fraud detection is making my life hell

#323

Post by [deleted] »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #227
qingcharles wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to place some online bets for a friend who is in prison. But the betting sites don't allow you to use an ethernet cable to connect to your router o_O (unless you also enable wifi.. except my desktop doesn't have wifi) https://helpcenter.il.betrivers.com/hc/en-us/articles/360049...

What is the heuristic they are checking for here? That problematic actors overwhelmingly will be unable to show an active wifi adapter?

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Automatic fraud detection is making my life hell

#324

Post by autoexec »

xkekjrktllss wrote: post #205
RIMR wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's safe to write off that 1% if you don't first make sure you understand who that 1% is and how decisions like this, especially at scale, could harm those people. If a person says that they are eligible to work in the USA, that should be taken in good faith. If 99% of applicants are fraudulently answering this question, you're probably doing something wrong and need to figure out what's broken in your…

> I don't think it's safe to write off that 1% if you don't first make sure you understand who that 1% is and how decisions like this, especially at scale, could harm those people. Businesses prioritize profit, not "safety" or whatever else you're talking about. Profit always comes first.

laws and regulations are supposed to provide a counter to a corporation's amoral greed which prioritizes profit over all else (including human life or suffering) and the harms that greed causes on a societal/global level.

If enough people are being wrongly treated because companies won't (and arguably shouldn't) care about the harms they are causing, that's when government should step in and find a way to force them to stop acting in ways that we (those of us who aren't amoral monsters) deem unacceptable.

It sounds like it might be time for governments to step up and address this situation with fraud detection, but hopefully part of that will involve cracking down harder on the rampant fraud going on that caused these flawed detection systems to be seen as necessary in the first place

Re: Tell HN: Automatic fraud detection is making my life hell

#326

Post by withinboredom »

starttoaster wrote: post #190
withinboredom wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wiring money via international accounts is instantaneous, last time I had wired money to me (last week). Or at least within an hour or two. The issue here, probably, is that there is usually a fairly large fee attached to it from the receiving bank. My bank, it's 25 bucks, flat rate. Each and every wire, even if it is 5 bucks being wired.

I'll take your word for it, a glance at google told me a wire transfer from a foreign bank will typically take about 2 days to clear, but I've only ever done wire transfers domestically. But yeah, a $25 fee might be the hold up, except if I'm understanding the OP, the wire transfer would be for costly medical care. Typically if I'm looking at paying a large bill, the bill blinds me from the pain of being nickel and d…

It’s India. The land of the thrifty, always looking for a deal (cultural stereotype). It’s the reason so many US companies have a hard time breaking into that market though.

My boss and I spent several weeks in India talking to people and learning the cultural basics just to figure out how to price our products. If you want to sell there, you need extremely competitive pricing with discounts, in a very price-sensitive market. Like, if you know the coupon culture in the US, it’s like that times 100.

Re: Tell HN: Automatic fraud detection is making my life hell

#327

Post by blowski »

chinchilla2020 wrote: post #298
cj wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with many of these examples is that 99% of the time, it is a sign of fraud, and 1% of the time it’s a false positive. > If a person's mobile phone number is associated with VoIP or Google Voice, that indicates fraud. I’ve been using this heuristic (along with VPN and IP geo lookup) when screening job candidates after a massive influx of developers outside the US applying for US-only remote roles. I discov…

The cost of the false positives are much higher than the false negatives. Temporarily slowing down down 99 scammers is not worth stranding one normal person in a foreign country with no means to access their money and no means to recover their account. The reality is that most lockdown-type protection schemes are just a roadbump, not a solution. They slow down the attacker. In fact, hackers are employing account lock…

So many transactions are flagged as false positives (way more than 1%), while there are a lot of false negatives because the tools don't improve as quickly as the scammers. The case for blocking transactions is getting weaker - we should instead strengthen the post-fraud response mechanisms, and then analyse the additional data we gain.

Re: Tell HN: Automatic fraud detection is making my life hell

#328

Post by OJFord »

teddyh wrote: post #198
OJFord wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PayPal refuse to close an account(↑) I didn't knowingly consent to the creation of, and certainly never provided any photographic ID for, because I refuse to 'prove my identity' to delete it. There's not even a real phone number (0s) or address (ABC nonsense) on the bloody thing, but of course giving up some PII they don't have will somehow verify that I have the authority to close an account which is basically name…

Note: You probably meant †, not ↑

Well I meant any character I could type (and find again easily for the second one) that would be unique within the comment and not give me italics, but sure.

I often use ^, since it's kind of like 'imagine there's a superscript here', think I just inadvertently held on it and ↑ popped up and up and I went with it.

Re: Tell HN: Automatic fraud detection is making my life hell

#329

Post by agubelu »

fishyjoe wrote: post #30
agubelu wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Raspberry Pi at home running an OpenVPN server, and a client config for each of my devices, and it's been extremely useful ever since.

How do you expose the Raspberry Pi so that you can reach it from the outside internet? My OpenVPN runs on a Digital Ocean droplet and I use it to tunnel into my home network, but having a direct route might be better.

Port forwarding in my home router. I have it forwarded to 53 UDP since some public networks have firewalls, but the DNS port is almost never blocked.

Re: Tell HN: Automatic fraud detection is making my life hell

#330

Post by [deleted] »

k8svet wrote: post #113

I have such immense disdain for Capital One and MasterCard for how they implement 3DS. I have been in Germany for 6 weeks. I have spent thousands of dollars between flights, train tickets, and hotels. Guess what I have to do every, single, time I buy a 3EUR train ticket? Receive an SMS on my American cellphone number. Their "solution" is to have a family member in the US add their number to my account, wake up in the…

[deleted]
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