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Interesting article, and good to know you're still operating despite the problems. > All those new subscribers beyond the first 800 were actually fakes who had
by LV-426 9y ago
Interesting article, and good to know you're still operating despite the problems.
> All those new subscribers beyond the first 800 were actually fakes who had subscribed with stolen credit card numbers [...] a lot of shipping addresses turned out to be fake as well
I don't know if this was already discussed in previous years, but this sounds like a rival (either established or wanting to copy your model).
Edit: https
- the-dude 9y agoSmall charges on stolen credit cards are usually to test if the card is still valid. Hence charities are popular to test on too.
- _susanoo 9y agoSo I guess credit card frauds are human too
- LV-426 9y agoAh, okay, makes sense (in an evil way). It just sounded like it was a sudden wave after the site had become more popular, but it maybe just appeared on the radar of scammers as well as the competition.
- bemmu 9y agoI have long stopped telling people whether their charge worked if an order looks suspicious, to prevent them from getting this information. So that wouldn't work now.
- the-dude 9y agoI am not sure I follow, could you clarify? You do send a confirmation after sign up I presume?
- homero 9y agoCan't find it but he had a whole blog post about it
- bemmu 9y agoWell I can't say "your payment was processed successfully", because that would give information to people who want to test cards. Rather I manually read through the orders, and only contact people if something went wrong with their payment AND the order doesn't look suspicious.
- the-dude 9y agoAre you on Stripe?
- bufferoverflow 9y agoI doubt about rivalry, his business doesn't make that much money, even after years of development and quite successful social media posts (I've heard about it a dozen times). He needs to expand into other niches. Japan is full of weird things.
- 55555 9y agoHe could probably build a sizable business sending out used panties every month. Or maybe I'm projecting.
- sireat 9y agoThing is that even with the limited market he has some 5 serious competitors. As bemmu readily admits competition is eating into his market. You name the niche you will see competition no matter how obscure.
- bemmu 9y agoThanks, fixed the https issue. Maybe I have a too rosy world view, but I don't think rivals would be this mean. Probably some simpler answer. Maybe there's some forum post somewhere like "how I got free candy by using this list of credit card numbers" and people keep trying that.
- LV-426 9y agoYou're probably right; I've read of people's Google ranking being trashed by rivals using spamming tools, so maybe my world view is too dark. OTOH, I seem to be naive about how credit card scamming works.