Rendered at 07:00:57 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
zuzululu 5 hours ago [-]
My suggestion is to just ban specific regions or countries and you can cut 80% of this fraud.
I'm not going to name those countries outright but you should never ever be launching globally until you have these safeguards in place.
Once you are known to be vulnerable to a certain scheme, it quickly becomes known in that region/country.
Again and again I'm reminded why high trust societies remain high trust and why low trust societies rarely transform into high trust society.
shash7 4 hours ago [-]
I've got 13 chargebacks over the last 4 years for my biz. Out of these, 10 came from US based cards. The other 3 came from Australia(my country).
Be careful when taking verbatim advice from internet strangers.
vbezhenar 3 hours ago [-]
I live in Kazakhstan (I assume that's one country nobody heard of and would disable in their dashboard) and my bank doesn't even have any UI for chargebacks, nor I ever heard about anyone doing chargebacks. They even explicitly warn me sometimes that I assume all responsibility for that payment. I guess I can go through some process, it's VISA after all, but it's definitely not something I can do easily.
thrownthatway 3 hours ago [-]
Everyone’s heard of Kazakhstan, if not for the architecture, at least because of Borat.
compsciphd 2 hours ago [-]
you were thrown that way in Kazakhstan? :)
plantain 3 hours ago [-]
+1 almost all from the US.
The strongest signal is whether they use an eBank/app that has a one-click button to report transactions as fraudulent. The Apple card(?) seems especially prevalent.
m463 3 hours ago [-]
I had a friend with the apple card, and there were fraudulent charges on her card before she even used it.
I think that caused her to over-scrutinize things.
But (years) later I saw her using apple pay. She had charges she didn't recognize and would immediately flag them. Thing is, I couldn't help but think they might have been real charges with weirdly named companies on the transaction.
lelanthran 36 minutes ago [-]
> She had charges she didn't recognize and would immediately flag them. Thing is, I couldn't help but think they might have been real charges with weirdly named companies on the transaction.
That's completely the companies fault. If you give a transaction a reference that the customer will not recognise, that's on you!
cortesoft 3 hours ago [-]
I feel like companies should do a better job of naming their payment entity something that a customer can know when they see it.
cherioo 2 hours ago [-]
It’s 2026, why can’t credit card and merchant figure out a way to transmit order summary URL as part of credit card transactions so I don’t need to match up transactions by amount??
1 hours ago [-]
Schiendelman 26 minutes ago [-]
They absolutely can. They just don't bother.
t-3 2 hours ago [-]
It's not really helpful if I recognize the name when the gas station doesn't put the charges on my card until Friday when I bought stuff there on Tuesday. Then I'm just confused and have to analyze my whole purchase history.
fweimer 42 minutes ago [-]
U.S. chargeback rules are different. In other countries, you cannot repudiate credit card transactions that you authorized (and this applies to Mastercard/Visa, too). You need to do something else if you end up in a dispute with the merchant.
hdra 3 hours ago [-]
not to mention, thats pretty bad advice for these chargeback frauds. not gonna deny some regions have higher risk of frauds, but these are mostly high-volume automated schemes.
in the case of these "friendly fraud" schemes, they are much more likely to come from more developed regions with strong consumer protection laws like the NA.
if anything in many of those "high risk" regions, chargeback are much less common because fewer consumer protection law e.g. banks would automatically reject chargebacks for transactions with 3DS OTP.
Cider9986 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, they will likely be spoofing their location anyway with residential IPs to let their payments go through easier and maintain identity separation.
zuzululu 4 hours ago [-]
13 over 4 years is tiny sample compared to what I've seen on international scale.
Great advice which is why data is what I'm relying on vs anecdotes.
verelo 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, all my chargebacks are Americans. Realtors are the worst.
paulddraper 4 hours ago [-]
How big is your business and where does it sell?
One chargeback a quarter is a lot, depending.
esseph 4 hours ago [-]
Just because the card is US-based doesn't mean the user is.
zuzululu 4 hours ago [-]
or American.
gingerlime 4 hours ago [-]
This case was Canada.
The US and I imagine Canada are known for the ease of chargebacks.
My experience in Europe is that it's a very tough process to even initiate (as a consumer)
jhancock 2 hours ago [-]
I was told by someone in the industry that New Zealand leads the pack for travelling outside NZ and coming home to refute charges.
Cider9986 5 hours ago [-]
Accept crypto for those countries, it doesn't have chargebacks and helps those vulnerable to the financial system.
epestr 4 hours ago [-]
I went down a bit of a search looking for counter evidence that crypto is likely less available to them, and it turns out both perspectives are true depending on the scale you look at. At the micro-level, survey data from emerging markets[0] confirms that crypto offers immunity against institutional failure and inflationary currency.
But this QJE article[1] argues there's a ceiling to how far things scale. Concluding that the cost to keep a decentralized network secure scales with its total economic value. So while there is immediate value to it's user, it might not scale well, and can't replace a country's financial system anyway because securing it at a sovereign scale would just be more expensive.
I dont follow. If regular finance to a country is that much distanced from global financial oversight and treaties where crypto (with awful spreads) becomes the norm that doesnt necessarily mean they are victims of international financial order but that regular financially modeling simply cannot manage their unique risk characteristics
Cider9986 3 hours ago [-]
Damn, I made a great reply and it never sent–that sucks.
I was more nuanced and specific, but I don't want to do it all again.
1. The fees are not awful idk what you mean, I pay between 0.1% and 1% fees on Monero transactions.
2. If the modelling can't manage their risk characteristics, they are by definition a victim of the financial system. I was more talking about people who have been debanked, though.
I have a Russian friend who can't pay for things online in fiat because of sanctions and the risk to his life from being on the free internet. So, he uses Monero and Tor and takes his OPSEC seriously. He is a victim of trad-fi, and Monero allows him to take his freedom back.
tsimionescu 2 hours ago [-]
This is actually one of the major reasons people should be very weary of accepting crypto, especially Monero. Instead of being able to basically outsource sanctions compliance to a bank, you take on the burden of trying to figure out if your customers are sanctioned yourself - with potentially dire consequences to your business if you get it wrong.
denkmoon 4 hours ago [-]
Have you ever actually used crypto to buy something? The transaction fees are exorbitant and prohibitive, and it's slow as balls.
Cider9986 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, all the time. I usually pay a 1 cent fee and the transaction goes through in seconds. Not sure what you're talking about.
I can send you some if you want to try it out, just drop an address(for a wallet I recommend cakewallet, but any popular open source wallet works).
I'm talking about Monero specifically, but your reply makes no sense because there are cryptos that have 0 transaction fee and instant confirmaiton. But they are less secure and private so I don't use them, I only use Monero.
denkmoon 32 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, monero has low transaction fees. And is a pain in the ass to get, even more so in significant quantity or at a good exchange rate. You pay a significant premium for the privacy. So just different types of fees. Monero is also far from instant in my experience.
I too have plenty of purchasing experience with crypto and I wouldn’t advocate for it for any legal transaction.
DaSHacka 3 hours ago [-]
That depends on the currency you use. I've only ever used Monero and the transfer fees are fractions of a cent.
shimman 4 hours ago [-]
Man people are still using the "it's a currency" grift when discussing crypto, did the El Salvador failure really teach you nothing?
That's less because it was Bitcoin and more because the entire effort was a slapdash affair pushed by Bukele in an effort for him and his buddies to profit off the cryptocurrency boom rather than being an inherent knock on cryptocurrency itself.
Also of all the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin is a pretty poor choice since it could be pretty well argued that it has lost the original purpose and devolved into a raw "line go up" financial instrument.
sieabahlpark 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Cider9986 3 hours ago [-]
That's the whole thing with Monero. It's actually used as a currency, not as a get rich quick scam. I believe 99% of crypto is a scam, but Monero is a real improvement for payments. The Monero community actually wants it to be adopted to spend it, it's not a price go up community.
Buy food with Monero on an ebay type platform called xmrbazaar.
GrapheneOS says it's the only crypto that they regularly get recurring small donations in.
koolba 4 hours ago [-]
Crypto does have the distinct cash like advantage of not having chargebacks. I don’t know of any other digital payment system with that property.
sieabahlpark 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
hosteur 3 hours ago [-]
Why do you not want to name them?
bellowsgulch 2 hours ago [-]
It makes the conversation turn into an electromagnet for racists.
You can’t ignore the stereotypes, but you can let people figure it out themselves. You don’t have to say it when it’s already obvious.
rtgfhyuj 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
edflsafoiewq 4 hours ago [-]
> I'm not going to name those countries outright
Why?
MBCook 3 hours ago [-]
I would assume it’s not that relevant to the advice. And people will always argue about the countries if you list them.
X isn’t bad. You should include Y. You only added/omitted Z because of $stereotype/$racistView/$otherAllegation.
Probably just not worth the hassle.
izacus 35 minutes ago [-]
I would assume they're talking about of their arse and being racist.
zonkerdonker 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
zuzululu 3 hours ago [-]
why is racism always the go to response for any suggestion that different countries have different valuesand that translates into observable and verifiable behavioral patterns that should be studied and recognized ?
how can it be that all countries and cultures are alike with no room for diversity in ethics and overton window ?
HaZeust 2 hours ago [-]
>"Again and again I'm reminded why high trust societies remain high trust and why low trust societies rarely transform into high trust society."
Outside of South Korea, from enormous help from Pax Americana, has it ever happened?
rtgfhyuj 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
zuzululu 3 hours ago [-]
I didn't name a single country and you reach for racism .... because I said fraud is more prevalent in some regions than others
rtgfhyuj 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
laserdancepony 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
OneDeuxTriSeiGo 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
zuzululu 4 hours ago [-]
I think you've done a good job of answering why.
k33n 1 hours ago [-]
Probably why it’s flagged.
shash7 6 hours ago [-]
I run a saas and we get this every now and then.
As a rule of thumb, when you get a chargeback you need to completely ban the customer from your db.
This includes:
- card ban
- email address ban
- fingerprint their access and ban
This will save you a lot of hassle when they try to signup/buy your product again and cause you the same amount of grief.
epa 5 hours ago [-]
Exploiters easily get around this. its a small group of people doing all of the abuse.
Cider9986 4 hours ago [-]
All 3 of those identifiers can be easily changed by advanced users. I'm curious what you mean by fingerprint their access. Is this like an on demand fingerprinting, I've only seen browser fingerprinting as a tracker for every user.
imp0cat 2 hours ago [-]
Nice try, chargebacker! ;)
Cider9986 2 hours ago [-]
I try to pay with Monero, so I can't chargeback :)
wahnfrieden 5 hours ago [-]
Use DeviceCheck if iOS app too. Uber does this to ban across accounts
Cider9986 4 hours ago [-]
I imagine most fraudsters wouldn't be using iOS. I'm curious if the android app fingerprinting solutions go cross user profile.
shawnz 5 hours ago [-]
You'd better be promptly responsive to legitimate customer support inquiries if you are going to have a policy like that
varenc 5 hours ago [-]
> They told me they don’t use evidence of chargeback abuse from one merchant to create cross-merchant fraud signals, or to take action against the customer’s card, email, or other details for other merchants.
I'm surprised they were able to get Stripe to actually state all of this clearly. It's nice that Stripe actually communicates details like this. But you can see the logic behind why many other big companies would just respond with an opaque message like "thank you for your report, it will be handled in the appropriate manner". Because saying the truth gets people more upset.
nathanmills 4 hours ago [-]
No, vagueness gets me much more upset, but there's just nothing to write about in those cases.
mamurphy 3 hours ago [-]
>No, vagueness gets me much more upset, but there's just nothing to write about in those cases.
I think this hits on the spirit behind GP's point. Clarity, leading to an article like the one posted, gets more people upset. The equation (Upset/People x People) results in a larger number -- people, as a whole, are more upset.
>But you can see the logic behind why many other big companies would just respond with an opaque message like "thank you for your report, it will be handled in the appropriate manner". Because saying the truth gets people more upset.
If a company is vague, there's nothing to write about, one person (maybe) gets more upset than they would have facing clarity.
But if the company is clear, there is something to write about, and an article like the one posted makes people, overall, more upset.
nathanmills 3 hours ago [-]
I don't see many people upset at Stripe over this, I certainly am not.
gingerlime 3 hours ago [-]
No. I would have been far more upset about a vague response. I was still upset that they don't do anything about it.
(it took a bit of back-n-forth to get a clear answer, but I did get a clear one. Their support is still excellent from my experience and communicate well)
nostromo 4 hours ago [-]
The customer screwed you over, and then their bank did too. Stripe didn't. I'm not sure why Stripe is getting blamed in the title and the article.
Yeah, maybe Stripe could do more without Radar, but I imagine it could also be fraught if Stripe was in the business of blocking customers from their entire network based on one vendor's complaint. Obviously a lot could go wrong with such an approach.
gingerlime 3 hours ago [-]
Yes. But Stripe didn't do anything to prevent the next merchant from falling into the same trap. They had all the evidence, and ignored it.
That was the point I tried to make with my blog post. And yes, if it was too easy for merchants to block consumers, that won't be fair either. But surely there's a middle ground here.
Stripe very explicitly told me that they don't do anything with such reports. It's simply ignored.
zuzululu 3 hours ago [-]
Stripe did the right thing here.
They cannot be arbitrators of every little edge cases that comes up. That's not their role.
Also I just wanna throw some praise at Stripe Support. They have an excellent team and go above and beyond to help.
gingerlime 3 hours ago [-]
Agree on Stripe support. They're excellent.
I don't think Stripe did the right thing here. They can do better to protect their own customers.
0123456789ABCDE 48 minutes ago [-]
stripe serves both sides of the transactions they process, seller and buyer.
if buyers were to perceive stripe as being dificult, they might churn. i certainly do this on paypal pages.
albedoa 3 hours ago [-]
> They cannot be arbitrators of every little edge cases
Is this an edge case? It looks like your standard chargeback fraud accompanied by a pile of evidence. What does a common case look like in contrast?
We should expect this to become even more rampant given the ease of clicking a chargeback button and the apparent lack of repercussions.
cwillu 3 hours ago [-]
> it could also be fraught if Stripe was in the business of blocking customers from their entire network based on one vendor's complaint
“You probably don’t want a system where one annoyed merchant can get someone blocked across the whole Stripe payment system. But there’s a pretty big gap between “automatically block this person everywhere” and “thanks for the screenshots, please consider Radar”, and this is where it gets frustrating.”
ripberge 2 hours ago [-]
I dealt with millions of dollars in chargebacks with Stripe. We sold tickets, they're easy to re-sell and our customers were tourists visiting shows from all over the world.
Stripe Radar was not a good product. It would score large numbers of very suspect transactions at a risk level of 1 or 2 (out of 100). I don't have an ML background, but something about their methodology was just flawed. It behaved as if there was a wire loose in it. Unfortunately, I don't think they're very incentivized to care.
bberenberg 5 hours ago [-]
I got hit with a fraudulent chargeback (claim was the purchase was unauthorized and the person showed up in person to a class) and it was doubly bad because they paid via Link which means that Stripe actively verified them via 2FA.
Can someone explain to me why Stripe (or a competitor) doesn't offer a setting "refuse transactions for cards that have filed > x chargebacks with <acquirer> merchants this year"?
gingerlime 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, though this rule sounds a bit tricky. Like what if someone legitimately had their card abused.
The thing that gets me is that Stripe boasts about their machine learning radar rules etc etc, but somehow can't feed it actually valuable data.
Stripe support saw the emails from the customer boasting about defrauding me, they completely agreed that this is a clear case of friendly-fraud, but did nothing with this info.
bberenberg 3 hours ago [-]
Stripe can’t do anything per the way CCs work. Asking for that to change is a big ask. Asking my vendor to help me not do business with people who are likely to scam me is a smaller one.
gingerlime 3 hours ago [-]
100% agree. They cannot reverse the dispute. I already lost the money. I understand.
But Stripe is exactly in a position to at least use the evidence I provided (in this case, the evidence included the customer clearly admitting to friendly fraud), and feed it into their fraud-prevention system in some way. This way, lots of signals can help protect merchants from friendly fraudsters. So yes, I see it as a pretty small and legit ask from Stripe.
SpicyLemonZest 5 hours ago [-]
I don't know this is the reason, but if I were asked to build such a system, I'd be pretty worried that it constitutes a consumer report under the terms of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Certainly I wouldn't want the inevitable news drama about it. "I'm just a poor innocent grandma, I'm a trusting person when it comes to Facebook ads, and Stripe punished me for getting scammed by banning me from half the stores on the Internet!"
AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago [-]
If your card is actually stolen then you should have the card number changed to prevent additional fraud and then the disputes would be against the old card number rather than the new one, right?
SpicyLemonZest 4 hours ago [-]
If your card is stolen you should, but not necessarily if you fall for a Facebook ad that ships you a pile of rocks or a paper photo of the product you thought you bought.
AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago [-]
Isn't that exactly when you should have your card number changed? You gave your card info to a blatant fraudster. If they're willing to ship you a pile of rocks then there's a significant chance they're willing to use the card info you gave them to make fraudulent purchases.
cperciva 5 hours ago [-]
claim was the purchase was unauthorized and the person showed up in person to a class
Certainly a person showed up in person to a class, but how do you know it was the person whose credit card was used?
bberenberg 5 hours ago [-]
It matched their LinkedIn photo.
jagged-chisel 5 hours ago [-]
I didn’t realize LinkedIn photos were a legitimate form of identification. Good thing they can’t be faked or changed readily.
mattmaroon 4 hours ago [-]
Do you imagine someone got a stolen credit card, made a linkedin with that name, used the card to attend a live class under the fake ID, or are you just doing the classic hacker news aaaaactually?
Comments like this have ruined this site. We all know that’s never happened once in history.
lunchbucket 4 hours ago [-]
If you care about the quality of the site, consider the guidelines about not responding to a bad comment with a worse one and not griping about how HN has gotten terrible or turned into reddit or what there you. Downvote, flag, and move on to better discussion, and you'll spend a lot more time engaging and contributing to good discussions.
Contributing to good discussions is the highest leverage way to promote the quality of the site. Spending time in poor discussions is what makes it feel like HN has gone to crap.
esseph 4 hours ago [-]
While funny, I literally just used my LinkedIn picture in a legal case of mistaken identity on behalf of a US state.
Not kidding.
mriet 5 hours ago [-]
Their business model is to allow as many possible "valid" transactions, not to serve their "clients". They're a PSP...
stego-tech 5 hours ago [-]
At this point I’m fairly convinced Stripe is Paypal 2.0, at least in spirit:
* Turns a blind eye to misdeeds on its platform
* Locks out adult creators/vendors after taking their money
* Is ubiquitous, but not well liked
I love that Stripe changed the game of fintech and made it accessible to more parties in a programmatic way, but I find myself repeating “avoid Stripe” to a lot of folks asking me for advice on dealing with payment nowadays for those reasons.
gyomu 4 hours ago [-]
That’s just the nature of these industries.
1) Incumbent is slow, clunky, unpleasant to deal with due to years of accumulated constraints to deal with
2) Newcomer can differentiate themselves by being nimble and pleasant to work with, taking market share
3) Over time newcomer has to deal with increasing amount of scrutiny, fraud, overhead, CYA type practices, etc
4) Newcomer is now incumbent, goto 1)
mattmaroon 4 hours ago [-]
Who do you recommend as an alternative?
Cider9986 2 hours ago [-]
Nowpayments is good for an easy crypto payment gateway.
No affiliation, I've just seen them used–it would be better if you self-hosted a BTCPay server.
stego-tech 4 hours ago [-]
I don’t have one at the moment, at least for my circles (artisans, craftspeople, adult creators in general). Much of it has fallen back on PayPal for folks without an LLC to hide behind, or Square if they’re incorporated as a business. The trick has been discretion and operating in a gray area: “novelty goods”, “graphic design work”, and “outerwear” as item descriptors or db entries, obscuring the actual content without actually lying or deceiving the payment processor.
Most paypros, most of the time, won’t look too hard unless there’s a problem or you’re tripping some internal security measure (like raking in a lot of cash in weird amounts). Of late they’ve been more intrusive due to some weird eTeen puritans, but that’s quieting down again as they remember they like making money, and throwing legal content off their platforms can very quickly cause an exodus of customers looking to avoid having their funds seized.
rsanek 1 hours ago [-]
That's pretty clearly deceiving. Would expect to run into problems with that kind of approach regardless of the specific payment processor -- everyone has T&C that you must follow.
danpalmer 4 hours ago [-]
This is just fraud.
"Friendly fraud" is accidental or with the correct intentions – such as the customer not recognising the charge and charging back.
gingerlime 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, and Stripe could do much better to prevent it. And doesn't.
danpalmer 52 minutes ago [-]
They could, but this isn't discussed in the blog post. The post is about literal fraud, which has a very different recourse for the merchant.
akerl_ 3 hours ago [-]
What would you like them to do?
Even in the post you're wishy washy about what you want. They offer a product that does enhanced fraud detection but you don't like that. You correctly call out that there's major risks with taking a merchant's report and using it to flag a user's future transactions.
There are similar offerings from other companies. I don't know if bundling this with payment processing is common.
bradley13 3 hours ago [-]
This is the point. You could file criminal charges. You could win in civil court.
GuardCalf 3 hours ago [-]
Solid post. The key takeaway for me was Stripe admitting they won't use post-dispute evidence of friendly fraud to build cross-merchant signals in Radar. That, plus the customer literally bragging about it after winning the chargeback, shows how lopsided the system is against indie sellers. Thanks for sharing.
sbierwagen 6 hours ago [-]
Stripe obviously records data around friendly fraud, (At minimum they implement Visa Compelling Evidence 3.0 https://support.stripe.com/questions/how-does-stripe-support... ) and since you did not include screenshots of the messages sent by Stripe support I suspect they were saying something carefully noncommittal and legally compliant to get you to go away, which then got spun into an outraged blog post.
gingerlime 3 hours ago [-]
Happy to share their responses verbatim. It was a rather long back-n-forth. Here's a snippet from the latest email, which I think makes it clear that they do not use the evidence I provided:
I can assure you that I will take note of your feedback and pass it to our team. Your point about post-transaction abuse detection is valid - while Stripe has robust network-level fraud detection, there does appear to be a gap in utilizing merchant-provided evidence of confirmed fraud to protect the broader merchant ecosystem. This type of feedback from merchants who have direct evidence is valuable for improving these systems.
minimaltom 1 hours ago [-]
Theres no gotchas in the quoted text, but curious if you got the impression from your emails that any of it was.. AI generated?
The camber, affirmation, word choice, triplet phrase... leaves me wondering. But without a smoking gun its hard to know if a model call was fired.
Dylan16807 5 hours ago [-]
> I suspect they were saying something carefully noncommittal and legally compliant to get you to go away
If their total dismissal of the problem is itself deception, that's not a particularly big improvement!
SpicyLemonZest 4 hours ago [-]
The problem is that, as patio11 once described in detail (https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...), there are genuine tradeoffs here that people get outraged by the mention of. How many legitimate sales should Stripe block in order to more effectively fight this kind of fraud? Merchants don't want to hear it, and consumers don't either. So financial companies invariably conclude that it's better to raise the question only in careful, indirect ways which could not be misinterpreted as a statement that fraud is good or OK or acceptable.
Dylan16807 49 minutes ago [-]
That's a reasonable argument for general money processing, but it's far weaker when you sell an anti-fraud product and try to get every transaction to give you a cut to use it.
And if they had even a little skin in the game they would care about such low-hanging fruit. You don't want a guy that's insulated from the consequences to be in charge of the [anti-]fraud dial.
8cvor6j844qw_d6 5 hours ago [-]
> Stripe obviously records data around friendly fraud
My only nit with Stipe is they don't allow me to delete card details for an ongoing subscription I don't plan to renew and already set it not to renew on the service billing page.
benoau 6 hours ago [-]
That link says the customer's undisputed transactions 4 - 12 months ago with you may establish their disputed transaction was actually legitimate, but the article is about someone who only made disputed purchases within a week or two.
bfkwlfkjf 6 hours ago [-]
What's your point? Do you think it matters what stripe said? What is something that they could've said that wouldn't have justified the outraged blog post?
SpicyLemonZest 6 hours ago [-]
The author thinks it matters what Stripe said, since they chose to use it as the title for their blog post. To the extent that it was just meant to be a lament that it's hard to be a small online merchant in an era of strong consumer protections, sure, I sympathize. But they seem to think it's a problem with Stripe that could be fixed if Stripe behaved better.
gingerlime 3 hours ago [-]
Author here. What makes you think Stripe cannot do better here?
akerl_ 3 hours ago [-]
Stripe has a customer's bank saying "the customer says they didn't make this payment" and you saying "the customer told me they did make this purchase and got the item and they're making fun of me".
They have no way to know if your evidence is real, any more than the bank has a way to know if their customer's evidence is real. Either one (or both) of you could be full of shit.
In that world, what would you like Stripe to do better?
gingerlime 3 hours ago [-]
What do they feed into their Radar machine learning system? surely there are lots of signals to use here. I'm not saying take only my word and ban this customer forever.
But they have my record as a merchant (successful charges, chargebacks, disputes etc), they have the payer record as a consumer (payments, chargebacks etc), when a merchant submits a dispute, they provide evidence. I provided evidence from DHL that the product was delivered.
No single piece of data is enough on its own, but Stripe is in a perfect position to use all those pieces to be able to better detect fraud.
Yet they explicitly do not use this data at all.
akerl_ 3 hours ago [-]
Based on the quote you provided, the CSR was very specific that what they don't use is merchant-provided evidence. They didn't say they don't leverage information about chargebacks or other disputes.
NDlurker 5 hours ago [-]
So I can crack open a Backwoods, stick my weed in there, and then glue back together with Ciglue? That's pretty cool.
gingerlime 3 hours ago [-]
Thank you. Haha, yes. My product is focused on cigar repair, but I know some weed smokers that use cigar glue (mine or other brands) for blunts.
iririririr 1 hours ago [-]
i went the other way, and already repaired more than one dropped cig with a good sheet of pure cellulose wrapping paper. I cannot imagine someone buying a glue for that. but I'm not german.
ValentineC 6 hours ago [-]
There aren't any screenshots of conversations with Stripe support in the blog post, but I'm guessing one other reason is that support agents are incentivised to close tickets or end conversations as quickly as possible.
startages 2 hours ago [-]
I help a lot of client with their ecommerce websites (mostly WooCommerce), attacks became so common recently, could be AI, but I found the best way to deal with this is to trace the patterns in access log and block the same patterns of checkout submission, this have worked really well for me. There are a lot of card testing attacks that Stripe doesn't care to handle as well as a lot of other fraud techniques, but there is always a pattern, especially automated ones. There is country, IP range, certain behavior (eg; no js, or direct api calls..etc). I really think it's easy to deal with this if you're willing to look deeper than a dashboard.
fencepost 3 hours ago [-]
I assume that this is basically just not worth pursuing for small-scale orders (e.g. $15ish for Ciglue), but for larger ones what are the reasonable approaches for scenarios that don't involve stolen card fraud?
Notably disputing a credit card charge is completely independent of whether someone owes the debt, the credit card is simply a convenient way for that payment to be handled. What's the point where other collection methods make sense? As an example, if you're consulting for someone and they pay you $x,xxx via card then charge it back, at least in most of the US I believe it's legal for you to do your own collection efforts and contact them repeatedly (this changes if you sell the debt and it's a third party attempting collections).
dghlsakjg 2 hours ago [-]
Correct, the debt is still valid.
You can try to collect through persistence, or take them to court, get a judgment, and then a court ordered collection. It all depends on the value of your time.
I’ve heard rumors that some merchant agreements with processors may include arbitration clauses for recovering chargebacks, but I’ve never seen it personally.
mchusma 4 hours ago [-]
I am pretty convinced that friendly fraud is about 90% of chargebacks. I have seen some genuine fraud, but dwarfed by friendly fraud over time across 3 companies.
5 hours ago [-]
reactordev 3 hours ago [-]
A friend of mine has a "1 dispute and your banned rule"... sounds like it could help in this situation. He'll catch wind of someone disputing they didn't receive a product he makes, despite his OCD with packaging, and gets a chargeback. He sits down each week with all the chargebacks he's gotten and bans them from future sales. It's not often but when he does, he complains about it when I see him.
phonon 4 hours ago [-]
Use EMV 3DS 2.x authentication with liability shift protection?
hdndjsbbs 5 hours ago [-]
I had a customer do something similar with a thousand-dollar product. They had signed for delivery and provided no evidence, but banks always side with the customer.
Cider9986 5 hours ago [-]
I thought that banks were less likely to side with the customer compared with credit cards.
nradov 3 hours ago [-]
Most credit cards are issued by banks.
Cider9986 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ios-contractor 5 hours ago [-]
To be fair, from stripe's point of view, how would they know that you and the alleged customer are not in on it for some reason they don't know?
AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago [-]
"Friendly fraud" is when the cardholder is in on it. They or an accomplice they've given access to their credit card go to a merchant, order and receive an expensive item with the card and then file a chargeback claiming they didn't make the purchase so they can keep both the item and the money.
wildzzz 4 hours ago [-]
What would be there to gain? The merchant loses money to the credit card processing fees, chargeback fees, and shipping cost along with the loss of the product, they gain nothing. Its a pretty expensive way to send a customer a free thing.
jellomjello 5 hours ago [-]
? in on what?
Suppafly 4 hours ago [-]
You know enough about the buyer to sue them or report them to the FBI.
tonyarkles 4 hours ago [-]
Suing someone in the Philippines probably won’t be worth the effort for an $18 product. And the FBI probably will not care much about a $18 international fraud.
gingerlime 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah. This case Canada. Not sure where to report but seems unlikely to do anything. Will happily report out of principle so any tips welcome.
RevEng 3 hours ago [-]
A lawsuit will cost you at least thousands of dollars if you can even serve the person. The FBI doesn't care about even thousands of dollars of fraud; they are busy chasing million dollar crime rings. Try reporting to your local police and see what they say - they will advise you it is not even worth your time to write out a report because it won't be investigated. Heck, my mom was defrauded out of $10k by a persistent group of people running a fake crypto investing company, and when she reported to the government body specifically responsible for investigating those cases, the nice man said, "Thanks for letting us know." They don't have time to investigate and prosecute minor fraud.
tptacek 5 hours ago [-]
Isn't this a property (and longstanding value judgement) of the entire payment card ecosystem?
AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago [-]
When a problem is industry-wide, people are naturally going to complain about the most prominent companies, but that's not necessarily even wrong. The most prominent companies are the ones in the strongest position to actually do something about it (e.g. develop better detection for friendly fraud or lobby for sensible regulatory changes), and have a stronger incentive to when they're the ones who keep getting blamed.
Nothing, it’s a 5% bobcat problem. The card processors can force the merchants to eat it and there’s nothing you can do save not accepting cards, which loses you the other 95% of the market.
Monero or honestly any crypto. There's no chargebacks and it can be more private.
wildzzz 4 hours ago [-]
That's fine for some things but my grandma is not going to buy from an online store that only takes crypto. Crypto as a payment option works well for computer-related merchants or for privacy-focused merchants. Like it wouldn't be uncommon to rent a VPS with crypto but it would be strange for an online candy store to accept it.
Cider9986 3 hours ago [-]
> That's fine for some things but my grandma is not going to buy from an online store that only takes crypto.
Of course not, unless it becomes mainstream, crypto usage will always be by early adopters and technologists. I don't care if you accept cards as well, I just want to be able to pay privately with Monero.
You're right that for chargebacks specifically the only way to eliminate them would be 100% crypto, not the option of card and crypto together, which is significantly more likely. But there are other benefits for customers(privacy), which is why I use it.
vintermann 42 minutes ago [-]
In fact it can be so private you'll never know who the merchant who didn't send you the product is.
N_Lens 4 hours ago [-]
Don't most crypto exchanges ban Monero?
Cider9986 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, unfortunately the banking system is hostile to privacy even though the vast majority of money laundering goes through fiat.
burnJS 3 hours ago [-]
I lose disputes all the time, no matter the evidence. I'm not happy with Stripe. The only thing keeping me from looking at alternatives is the low volume of fraud committed against my SaaS.
Do better Stripe. Be better Stripe. Or eventually we will find someone better. Think. Don't enshittify. Your support has already become covered in it by doing the needful.
I'm not going to name those countries outright but you should never ever be launching globally until you have these safeguards in place.
Once you are known to be vulnerable to a certain scheme, it quickly becomes known in that region/country.
Again and again I'm reminded why high trust societies remain high trust and why low trust societies rarely transform into high trust society.
Be careful when taking verbatim advice from internet strangers.
The strongest signal is whether they use an eBank/app that has a one-click button to report transactions as fraudulent. The Apple card(?) seems especially prevalent.
I think that caused her to over-scrutinize things.
But (years) later I saw her using apple pay. She had charges she didn't recognize and would immediately flag them. Thing is, I couldn't help but think they might have been real charges with weirdly named companies on the transaction.
That's completely the companies fault. If you give a transaction a reference that the customer will not recognise, that's on you!
in the case of these "friendly fraud" schemes, they are much more likely to come from more developed regions with strong consumer protection laws like the NA.
if anything in many of those "high risk" regions, chargeback are much less common because fewer consumer protection law e.g. banks would automatically reject chargebacks for transactions with 3DS OTP.
Great advice which is why data is what I'm relying on vs anecdotes.
One chargeback a quarter is a lot, depending.
The US and I imagine Canada are known for the ease of chargebacks.
My experience in Europe is that it's a very tough process to even initiate (as a consumer)
But this QJE article[1] argues there's a ceiling to how far things scale. Concluding that the cost to keep a decentralized network secure scales with its total economic value. So while there is immediate value to it's user, it might not scale well, and can't replace a country's financial system anyway because securing it at a sovereign scale would just be more expensive.
[0]: https://www.mdpi.com/1911-8074/17/10/467 [1]: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/140/1/1/7824430
I was more nuanced and specific, but I don't want to do it all again.
1. The fees are not awful idk what you mean, I pay between 0.1% and 1% fees on Monero transactions.
2. If the modelling can't manage their risk characteristics, they are by definition a victim of the financial system. I was more talking about people who have been debanked, though.
I have a Russian friend who can't pay for things online in fiat because of sanctions and the risk to his life from being on the free internet. So, he uses Monero and Tor and takes his OPSEC seriously. He is a victim of trad-fi, and Monero allows him to take his freedom back.
I can send you some if you want to try it out, just drop an address(for a wallet I recommend cakewallet, but any popular open source wallet works).
I'm talking about Monero specifically, but your reply makes no sense because there are cryptos that have 0 transaction fee and instant confirmaiton. But they are less secure and private so I don't use them, I only use Monero.
I too have plenty of purchasing experience with crypto and I wouldn’t advocate for it for any legal transaction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_in_El_Salvador
Also of all the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin is a pretty poor choice since it could be pretty well argued that it has lost the original purpose and devolved into a raw "line go up" financial instrument.
Buy food with Monero on an ebay type platform called xmrbazaar.
(https://xmrbazaar.com/search-category/food/)
Donate to non-profits in Monero
(https://donatemonero.org)
GrapheneOS says it's the only crypto that they regularly get recurring small donations in.
You can’t ignore the stereotypes, but you can let people figure it out themselves. You don’t have to say it when it’s already obvious.
Why?
X isn’t bad. You should include Y. You only added/omitted Z because of $stereotype/$racistView/$otherAllegation.
Probably just not worth the hassle.
how can it be that all countries and cultures are alike with no room for diversity in ethics and overton window ?
Outside of South Korea, from enormous help from Pax Americana, has it ever happened?
As a rule of thumb, when you get a chargeback you need to completely ban the customer from your db. This includes:
- card ban - email address ban - fingerprint their access and ban
This will save you a lot of hassle when they try to signup/buy your product again and cause you the same amount of grief.
I'm surprised they were able to get Stripe to actually state all of this clearly. It's nice that Stripe actually communicates details like this. But you can see the logic behind why many other big companies would just respond with an opaque message like "thank you for your report, it will be handled in the appropriate manner". Because saying the truth gets people more upset.
I think this hits on the spirit behind GP's point. Clarity, leading to an article like the one posted, gets more people upset. The equation (Upset/People x People) results in a larger number -- people, as a whole, are more upset.
>But you can see the logic behind why many other big companies would just respond with an opaque message like "thank you for your report, it will be handled in the appropriate manner". Because saying the truth gets people more upset.
If a company is vague, there's nothing to write about, one person (maybe) gets more upset than they would have facing clarity.
But if the company is clear, there is something to write about, and an article like the one posted makes people, overall, more upset.
(it took a bit of back-n-forth to get a clear answer, but I did get a clear one. Their support is still excellent from my experience and communicate well)
Yeah, maybe Stripe could do more without Radar, but I imagine it could also be fraught if Stripe was in the business of blocking customers from their entire network based on one vendor's complaint. Obviously a lot could go wrong with such an approach.
That was the point I tried to make with my blog post. And yes, if it was too easy for merchants to block consumers, that won't be fair either. But surely there's a middle ground here.
Stripe very explicitly told me that they don't do anything with such reports. It's simply ignored.
Also I just wanna throw some praise at Stripe Support. They have an excellent team and go above and beyond to help.
I don't think Stripe did the right thing here. They can do better to protect their own customers.
if buyers were to perceive stripe as being dificult, they might churn. i certainly do this on paypal pages.
Is this an edge case? It looks like your standard chargeback fraud accompanied by a pile of evidence. What does a common case look like in contrast?
We should expect this to become even more rampant given the ease of clicking a chargeback button and the apparent lack of repercussions.
“You probably don’t want a system where one annoyed merchant can get someone blocked across the whole Stripe payment system. But there’s a pretty big gap between “automatically block this person everywhere” and “thanks for the screenshots, please consider Radar”, and this is where it gets frustrating.”
Stripe Radar was not a good product. It would score large numbers of very suspect transactions at a risk level of 1 or 2 (out of 100). I don't have an ML background, but something about their methodology was just flawed. It behaved as if there was a wire loose in it. Unfortunately, I don't think they're very incentivized to care.
Can someone explain to me why Stripe (or a competitor) doesn't offer a setting "refuse transactions for cards that have filed > x chargebacks with <acquirer> merchants this year"?
The thing that gets me is that Stripe boasts about their machine learning radar rules etc etc, but somehow can't feed it actually valuable data.
Stripe support saw the emails from the customer boasting about defrauding me, they completely agreed that this is a clear case of friendly-fraud, but did nothing with this info.
But Stripe is exactly in a position to at least use the evidence I provided (in this case, the evidence included the customer clearly admitting to friendly fraud), and feed it into their fraud-prevention system in some way. This way, lots of signals can help protect merchants from friendly fraudsters. So yes, I see it as a pretty small and legit ask from Stripe.
Certainly I wouldn't want the inevitable news drama about it. "I'm just a poor innocent grandma, I'm a trusting person when it comes to Facebook ads, and Stripe punished me for getting scammed by banning me from half the stores on the Internet!"
Certainly a person showed up in person to a class, but how do you know it was the person whose credit card was used?
Comments like this have ruined this site. We all know that’s never happened once in history.
Contributing to good discussions is the highest leverage way to promote the quality of the site. Spending time in poor discussions is what makes it feel like HN has gone to crap.
Not kidding.
* Turns a blind eye to misdeeds on its platform
* Locks out adult creators/vendors after taking their money
* Is ubiquitous, but not well liked
I love that Stripe changed the game of fintech and made it accessible to more parties in a programmatic way, but I find myself repeating “avoid Stripe” to a lot of folks asking me for advice on dealing with payment nowadays for those reasons.
1) Incumbent is slow, clunky, unpleasant to deal with due to years of accumulated constraints to deal with
2) Newcomer can differentiate themselves by being nimble and pleasant to work with, taking market share
3) Over time newcomer has to deal with increasing amount of scrutiny, fraud, overhead, CYA type practices, etc
4) Newcomer is now incumbent, goto 1)
No affiliation, I've just seen them used–it would be better if you self-hosted a BTCPay server.
Most paypros, most of the time, won’t look too hard unless there’s a problem or you’re tripping some internal security measure (like raking in a lot of cash in weird amounts). Of late they’ve been more intrusive due to some weird eTeen puritans, but that’s quieting down again as they remember they like making money, and throwing legal content off their platforms can very quickly cause an exodus of customers looking to avoid having their funds seized.
"Friendly fraud" is accidental or with the correct intentions – such as the customer not recognising the charge and charging back.
Even in the post you're wishy washy about what you want. They offer a product that does enhanced fraud detection but you don't like that. You correctly call out that there's major risks with taking a merchant's report and using it to flag a user's future transactions.
There are similar offerings from other companies. I don't know if bundling this with payment processing is common.
The camber, affirmation, word choice, triplet phrase... leaves me wondering. But without a smoking gun its hard to know if a model call was fired.
If their total dismissal of the problem is itself deception, that's not a particularly big improvement!
And if they had even a little skin in the game they would care about such low-hanging fruit. You don't want a guy that's insulated from the consequences to be in charge of the [anti-]fraud dial.
My only nit with Stipe is they don't allow me to delete card details for an ongoing subscription I don't plan to renew and already set it not to renew on the service billing page.
They have no way to know if your evidence is real, any more than the bank has a way to know if their customer's evidence is real. Either one (or both) of you could be full of shit.
In that world, what would you like Stripe to do better?
But they have my record as a merchant (successful charges, chargebacks, disputes etc), they have the payer record as a consumer (payments, chargebacks etc), when a merchant submits a dispute, they provide evidence. I provided evidence from DHL that the product was delivered.
No single piece of data is enough on its own, but Stripe is in a perfect position to use all those pieces to be able to better detect fraud.
Yet they explicitly do not use this data at all.
Notably disputing a credit card charge is completely independent of whether someone owes the debt, the credit card is simply a convenient way for that payment to be handled. What's the point where other collection methods make sense? As an example, if you're consulting for someone and they pay you $x,xxx via card then charge it back, at least in most of the US I believe it's legal for you to do your own collection efforts and contact them repeatedly (this changes if you sell the debt and it's a third party attempting collections).
You can try to collect through persistence, or take them to court, get a judgment, and then a court ordered collection. It all depends on the value of your time.
I’ve heard rumors that some merchant agreements with processors may include arbitration clauses for recovering chargebacks, but I’ve never seen it personally.
https://xkcd.com/325/
Of course not, unless it becomes mainstream, crypto usage will always be by early adopters and technologists. I don't care if you accept cards as well, I just want to be able to pay privately with Monero.
You're right that for chargebacks specifically the only way to eliminate them would be 100% crypto, not the option of card and crypto together, which is significantly more likely. But there are other benefits for customers(privacy), which is why I use it.
Do better Stripe. Be better Stripe. Or eventually we will find someone better. Think. Don't enshittify. Your support has already become covered in it by doing the needful.
How is it natural if DHL had proof of delivery.
They have a comprehensive customer ID system and let you adjust desired risk levels for various forms of fraud.
Epic username btw lol