TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

How we fight credit card fraud at Watsi

10 pointsby chaseadam17over 11 years ago

2 comments

patio11over 11 years ago
For people wondering &quot;What possible reason would someone run fraudulent credit cards through <i>a charity</i>?&quot;, the answer is:<p>1) Most stolen credit cards are sold, generally in large blocks.<p>2) The value of a stolen credit card is highly dependent on a few factors, including most saliently age since acquisition (since they&#x27;re increasingly likely to be discovered and canceled over time) and whether they&#x27;ve been recently vetted or not (since otherwise the market is a market for non-working lemons, where you cream off known-good cards and sell known-bad cards).<p>3) Putting a transaction through any merchant which actually runs the card and returns a result will successfully vet the card. Charities, Internet startups, and Internet startup charities are all known to have lower-than-average risk screens in place, so they&#x27;re preferentially abused for this.<p>A credit card fraud ring used BCC for same reasons earlier this year, by buying it through our Paypal buy now button. We reversed ~60 transactions before I (apparently?) successfully convinced the Paypal live security team to bring the hammer down on them.<p>P.S. Watsi folks, you should talk to Gumroad or SiftScience. Both of them are YC companies (so I rather suspect both would help you out under a frieNDA or something) and both have ideas which would work for you.
cpachover 11 years ago
Any background on what this is about?