51–60 of 103 posts
I have never once given one of these valley payments companies my bank account information, and this sort of garbage is why. If I need to pay something via PayPal, Venmo, or whoever the hell else, I'll use a credit card and happily eat a 3% fee for doing so, and that's the price I pay to be able to tell Chase or Amex to handle it when some fraudster gets at my info rather than watch my bank account get drained.
This confuses me about discussions like these on HN: On the one hand, there are so many stories on HN complaining about incompetent and dystopian security practices in the financial industry. And many tips on how to cope with it. Like not giving PayPal your bank account, rather pay 3% to put a credit card between PayPal and your bank account. And to keep your phone number secret to avoid sim swapping and PayPal expos…
Biggest problem is losing the key. Also how to sync the key between devices. Not get tricked into giving it away.
Best case might be a authenticator type of app piggy backing on your phones physical and electronic security.
Most people look after their phones. Then maybe they back up somewhere else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't claim to speak for "everyone", but I was a crypto fanboy in the early days, when it seemed destined to be an actual currency, which would be great for all the reasons you mention. But at some point it all went off the rails: crypto became a deeply rigged casino targeting the most vulnerable people they could find, fueled by insane amounts of energy consumption and money laundering.
The same happened during the early days of the internet. Insane amounts of companies were founded, hyped and IPOed. Many many naive people turned into investors, losing trillions of Dollars. Should we have discarded the whole internet idea because of that?
This is silly. Nobody is going to sim swap you to steal your paypal funds, getting the money out is way too difficult.
I’ve seen sim swaps to get desirable instagram handles. I have to believe it’s easier to extract money from a PayPal account takeover than insta.
Same is not true of paypal funds.
My wife has been getting a bunch of these today. I still don't see what the potential problem is if an attacker has my wife's email (which I can imagine has been made public by 100 data breaches etc) and phone number. A bad actor can't use those to log into Paypal? You still need to GET the text message code. Is the risk a SIM Swapping attack?
Six digit code means they can brute force it if they try across enough accounts. 500k tries they'll have 50% success rate of brute forcing 1 account.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't claim to speak for "everyone", but I was a crypto fanboy in the early days, when it seemed destined to be an actual currency, which would be great for all the reasons you mention. But at some point it all went off the rails: crypto became a deeply rigged casino targeting the most vulnerable people they could find, fueled by insane amounts of energy consumption and money laundering.
The same happened during the early days of the internet. Insane amounts of companies were founded, hyped and IPOed. Many many naive people turned into investors, losing trillions of Dollars. Should we have discarded the whole internet idea because of that?
Scams happened over the internet, but didn't exploit critical problems with the technology itself.
Crypto scams exploit problems with crypto itself. Where else can a tiny mistake allow people to irreversibly drain your account in an instant and vanish?
This is silly. Nobody is going to sim swap you to steal your paypal funds, getting the money out is way too difficult.
My recent PayPal experience: - try to pay for rental car in Mexico - transaction declined - get email saying account permanently locked - get 2nd email w/ link to unblock (says click on unblock notification) - no notification - chatbot asks if I want help, redirects me to help page - help page contains none of the following: unblock, unlock, locked - chatbot asks if I still need help, says I have to call - call link…
I once paid for internet via public wifi for a time. When my CC expired and it was time to renew... that was literally impossible because of how they redirected you to their paywall when you tried to visit anything else. Even if you were trying to go to the billing page to renew. So you literally couldn't pay them. Oh, and even if you had other internet access, that wouldn't work either, because the billing site was nowhere on the open internet, only via the municipal wifi.
Or there are similar loops in Amazon's help system, where they make it hard to get a human and it just loops you around the same sets of options when you tell it that it's not working right. So you have to swear at it to see if you can trigger the algorithms to detect frustration and get you out.
And those aren't even deliberate, like the dark patterns some places engage when you try to cancel a service.
This is silly. Nobody is going to sim swap you to steal your paypal funds, getting the money out is way too difficult.
What about buying something?
The reality is that cashing out significant amounts of money this way tends to be rather difficult.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because at the end of the day PayPal is better for the average consumer than a solution where somebody needs to handle a private key. A lot of tech savvy people lost money due to losing their keys. Now imagine the disaster if your mother needs to handle them. Payment solutions are also heavily regulated, often also in favour of the consumer. If my bank goes bankrupt or gets hacked I have much better garuantees of get…
For the average use "handle a private key" just means installing an app. If crypto currencies were popular enough, it would already come with a phone, just like a browser. People already keep super important stuff on their phones. Their email accounts, their lifetimes photos, their contacts, their notes... Losing those seems to be more dangerous than losing your digital wallet. An event that would be similar to losin…
Your equivalent is not "loosing your wallet, it's loosing access to your bank account (which would cost at least thousands of euros). There is a difference! No, being in physical possession of my bank card doesn't give you the right to the contents of it. And there are _lots_ of redundant security layers beyond the simple card.