True Link (YC S13) To Help The Elderly Avoid Scammers With Pre-Paid Visa Cards

Wow! Great idea, great mission. Someone smart and well advised solving serious problems for real people who need help, that makes me happy.<p>My 2 cents: as you want to preserv their sense of autonomy, please use a card design that looks like an usual credit card. The &quot;Visa&quot; is already there, so just use some of these typical shiny, fancy, &quot;3d&quot; background designs of the credit cards we all get used to. If your card is like the one at the picture on the landing page, it looks like a &quot;toy card&quot;, something you give to children to pretend they have credit cards. Your customers will notice it and feel their son just substituted their real credit cards for make-believe ones.

Brilliant stuff.<p>THIS is something we need in my dear country Nigeria. Internet commerce has refused to take off because of the fear (sadly not misplaced). I am thinking if this service is not better positioned towards the Banks than the individuals themselves.<p>There would be default permitted websites and locations from where transactions are permitted. If a new website wants to be &quot;registered&quot; they apply to the bank to be put on a whitelist.<p>Presently, it is a blanket over securing that is taking place that makes it almost impossible to perform online transactions with Nigerian companies.<p>Great job.

<i>In Stinchcombe’s words, True Link’s mission is quite simple: &quot;Fuck these scammers.&quot;</i><p>Amazing how fast you can neutralize all that noble work with just 3 words.<p>(FriendAndCoworkerLanguage != BusinessAttractionLanguage)

I think the hard part is identifying&#x2F;normalizing the merchant based on the 20 character billing name + phone. Each McDonalds and Starbucks have wildly different text. Large purchases are immediately flagged for sure, purchases outside the local area. There is a lot of low hanging fruit. Crowd sourcing helps too. Interesting idea.

Really like this idea. My grandmother has had alzheimers for about a decade. There was a time at the beginning when this would have helped her spirits.

Bit confused with the difference between this versus something like an Amex pre-paid card. Why would someone use True Link over one of the existing pre-paid card options? A web interface?

This is awesome. I wonder if they will publish stats and ideally stories about &quot;saves&quot; they make. I guess they would need wide adoption to cause &quot;herd immunity&quot; for non user elderly though.

<i>...it’s hard to put an exact number on the scope of scams out there. But he estimates that there are 10 million people in the U.S. above a certain age who are living alone and susceptible to fraud.</i><p>I&#x27;m not sure what the point of the latter sentence is - I had to read it twice to make sure that I wasn&#x27;t missing something...am I?

How does this differ from Amex PASS?

This is a great idea.