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I hate it when my cynicism alarm goes off, but this feel-good tweet about hacking payment transfers for good is written by a guy who's twitter bio says he's a P

I hate it when my cynicism alarm goes off, but this feel-good tweet about hacking payment transfers for good is written by a guy who's twitter bio says he's a PM at Transferwise ("We’re building the best way to move money around the world.") All the replies are people contrasting shitty experiences they've had with their own wallets and money transfer services. His top pinned tweet is: > Reasons to work at @TransferWise: > 1. Irreversibly change the world of finance to be fairer > 2. Excellent office dogs [video of cute dogs running around] I mean, I'd love this to be true, but the coincidences are uncanny.

wyxuan 7y ago
Transfer wise does forex not traditional bank transfers like this
- floatrock 7y ago
  Sure, but 150k users liked and 30k users retweeted a deep-dive engagement into the intricacies of how hack-ey the current money transfer system is. Some percentage of those people who deal with this stuff on a weekly or monthly basis will say "yeah, this is f'd, there must be a better way..."
  - detaro 7y ago
    Where is there a "deep-dive engagement into the intricacies of how hack-ey the current money transfer system is" at the link? I see a tweet with a fun story that's about no negative part of banking and bunch of replies about how this is cool or how the commenter also has a story about lost property. If it's deeper I didn't scroll far enough down, and I doubt very many of those interacting with the tweet did either.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Plenty of people here who are paid or pay someone else in foreign currency. Myself included.
  - dzhiurgis 7y ago
    TrasnferWise saved me thousands already, even if Interactive Brokers are half the price, but not an easy UI.
dmix 7y ago
If it wasn't a real story it's a brilliant bit of marketing. But this may be more commonly known 'hack' in the UK with their banking system than it appears.
- ryanlol 7y ago
  >If it wasn't a real story it's a brilliant bit of marketing Marketing for what?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Transferwise.
    - ryanlol 7y ago
      But which Transferwise product? Without any kind of a link between these posts and Transferwise products they might as well be posting cat photos.
lucb1e 7y ago
Isn't this a success story of a regular bank account though? I would find this super far-fetched as some sort of weird promotion, especially where OP's company is never mentioned and not actually posed as better than a regular bank account (or a regular bank account as bad). Let's just enjoy nice stories that we come across.
- dpcan 7y ago
  Marketing is not a banner ad or billboard anymore. A viral tweet like this could land him 5 minute segments on any number of local-news stations that need a feel-good piece. He'll then have the opportunity to talk about his company. And followers. As this tweet makes it's rounds through the media, he'll get more. He can then use that following to promote his business. It opened the door for people to openly bash their existing bank or financial provider, and he (and his company) didn't have to say ANYTHING - their followers did it for them. AND... a bank card without a name on it of any kind? A wallet without any identifiable information? No license, no other credit cards, no shopper cards, not a business card???? Nothing?
  - kraftman 7y ago
    Those things don't have phone numbers/email on them, so getting in contact with the owner isn't that easy.
    - dpcan 7y ago
      Most cards have a business name or person's name. Taking the card to the police or the bank would get a call directly to them. Who would think, I'm going to start a chain of 1 penny transaction to contact this person at this bank account, and hope they get them before they cancel their bank account because they lost their wallet. And is this a wallet with cash and a single card with no identifiable information on it? NOTHING else? EDIT: Because I can't reply below: because they have access to that bank account now. Pretty simple. The card in question is said to have their banking info right on the card, so you close that account and start a new one.
chrisseaton 7y ago
But this is a standard bank account and transfer? This is the old way of doing things, not his new way.
smcl 7y ago
Don’t ignore your bullshit-ometer on social media platforms, it’s rarely wrong.
timcameron 7y ago
Hi, I’m the guy who lost his wallet! I agree it’s a convenient overlap and understand your cynicism but I assure you that it’s genuine. I can even provide you with the receipt from me riding a jump bike around for an hour looking for my wallet! :) EDIT: spelling + I did pin the tweet about transferwise after it blew up, and I also changed my bio to share my small side project: Podmast.com - check it out :)
- benatkin 7y ago
  That's what someone who does this kind of thing would say. I'm not saying I think it's fake, but I think it might be. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and posting a defense isn't evidence. Edit: I wondered if I got this slogan right, and it turns out to have a name - The Sagan Standard! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard
  - ztratar 7y ago
    The amount of cynicism is too damn high!
    - benatkin 7y ago
      I'm not all that cynical about it. I don't think that people (micro-)blogging made up stories (which this may or may not be) means there's something terribly wrong with them. It's a white lie told repeatedly with a straight face. It's worse than a white lie told once, but not as bad as a more directly harmful lie like faking an illness and collecting money from strangers on GoFundMe.
  - braythwayt 7y ago
    > That's what someone who does this kind of thing would say. Speaking of cynicism, this argument is known as an Ad Hominem Circumstantial: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/9/Ad-Hominem-Circumstantial https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...
- dpcan 7y ago
patio11 7y ago
For what it is worth, I saw this story and thought "Oh, I love this; creative use of metadata in the payments system", principally because I am professionally involved with payments. All the "coincidences" here are explainable by "people who geek out on X will tend to see a lot more X in their daily lives than civilians and will become focal points for other people who geek out on X, who see a lot more X in their daily lives than civilians." You can trivially reproduce "OMG banks!" on any social media feed you control; just kvetch in public about a banking story. Also, there are people on HN who do marketing for a living (checks business cards including me?), and to the extent that you model someone as going into their planning meeting with "OK guys I have this great idea for how to hit our Q4 numbers: lets do stealthmarketing on our personal Twitter accounts", you should know that that would not receive the reply "Genius Bob, why do we employ teams of expensive professionals to do this when you come up with such pearls of wisdom for free." Mentioning this half because excessive cynicism is a failure mode for geeks and half because many people on HN will, at some point in their life, actually have to get good at causing people to adopt a product or service, and HNers should correct the mental model that would suggest that this is in any way aimed at or effective at causing adoption of a product or service.
- natural219 7y ago
  I guess we can assume by this that TransferWise is patio11 approved :D
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  Reflexive cynicism is a simple, easy way of asserting intellectual superiority over others without directly insulting them. Super common in internet comments, including, arguably, this one. It's vastly less complicated to just assume and assert that everything is bullshit everywhere, all the time, than to actually try to discern where cynicism and optimism are each warranted.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    >Reflexive cynicism is a simple, easy way of asserting intellectual superiority over others without directly insulting them. Super common in internet comments, including, arguably, this one. Or maybe it's a natural adaptation to a world where almost everybody seems to have some ulterior motive. Edit: a word
braythwayt 7y ago
Be all that as it may, in a world where people use their Wi-Fi SSIDs to say nasty things to their neighbours, I totally buy that this story is plausible.
- tripzilch 7y ago
  Or set your phone to hotspot mode and transmit a poop emoji everywhere you go! It's the little things in life ...
bpsh 7y ago
Just want to chime in to tell any prospective new Transferwise customer that my experience with the company has been dreadful. They can for no reason deactivate your account with funds still remaining. That’s not the problem though, it is that their appeals teams takes over 2 weeks to respond per message. Yep, waited 3 weeks to get an answer for deactivation. Another 3 weeks to convince them it was an error. Now it has been a month since I sent in my supporting documents and no reply yet. Think I might have to file a formal complaint at this point.
dang 7y ago
There's a softer version of this intuition: a guy who works for Transferwise would be more likely to write a blog post about something like this when it happened to him.
MildlySerious 7y ago
It's not noteworthy all of itself, things get unproportional amounts of attention all the time on the internet, but I find it interesting that this story then ended up on the very top of HN
incompatible 7y ago
Hacking payment transfers to send messages can be used for "good or evil". I recently read about somebody using it to harass an ex-partner.
woutr_be 7y ago
To be a bit more cynical, every time I see those generic "change the world" and cheeky "office dogs" things listed as a reason to work there, I can't help think; "you really couldn't come up with any meaningful reasons to work there?" Maybe I've already gone through enough shitty startups to not fall for it anymore, or maybe I'm just a cynical guy in general.
puranjay 7y ago
I understand the cynicism, but at this point, Transferwise isn't a scrappy startup and I can't see any reason why they'd want to pull off such a PR stunt. They're valued at $3.5B. $3.5B companies don't "fake lose" their wallets to get to the top of HN

wyxuan 7y ago

Transfer wise does forex not traditional bank transfers like this

floatrock 7y ago
Sure, but 150k users liked and 30k users retweeted a deep-dive engagement into the intricacies of how hack-ey the current money transfer system is. Some percentage of those people who deal with this stuff on a weekly or monthly basis will say "yeah, this is f'd, there must be a better way..."
- detaro 7y ago
  Where is there a "deep-dive engagement into the intricacies of how hack-ey the current money transfer system is" at the link? I see a tweet with a fun story that's about no negative part of banking and bunch of replies about how this is cool or how the commenter also has a story about lost property. If it's deeper I didn't scroll far enough down, and I doubt very many of those interacting with the tweet did either.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Plenty of people here who are paid or pay someone else in foreign currency. Myself included.
- dzhiurgis 7y ago
  TrasnferWise saved me thousands already, even if Interactive Brokers are half the price, but not an easy UI.

dmix 7y ago

If it wasn't a real story it's a brilliant bit of marketing. But this may be more commonly known 'hack' in the UK with their banking system than it appears.

ryanlol 7y ago
>If it wasn't a real story it's a brilliant bit of marketing Marketing for what?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Transferwise.
  - ryanlol 7y ago
    But which Transferwise product? Without any kind of a link between these posts and Transferwise products they might as well be posting cat photos.

lucb1e 7y ago

Isn't this a success story of a regular bank account though? I would find this super far-fetched as some sort of weird promotion, especially where OP's company is never mentioned and not actually posed as better than a regular bank account (or a regular bank account as bad). Let's just enjoy nice stories that we come across.

dpcan 7y ago
Marketing is not a banner ad or billboard anymore. A viral tweet like this could land him 5 minute segments on any number of local-news stations that need a feel-good piece. He'll then have the opportunity to talk about his company. And followers. As this tweet makes it's rounds through the media, he'll get more. He can then use that following to promote his business. It opened the door for people to openly bash their existing bank or financial provider, and he (and his company) didn't have to say ANYTHING - their followers did it for them. AND... a bank card without a name on it of any kind? A wallet without any identifiable information? No license, no other credit cards, no shopper cards, not a business card???? Nothing?
- kraftman 7y ago
  Those things don't have phone numbers/email on them, so getting in contact with the owner isn't that easy.
  - dpcan 7y ago
    Most cards have a business name or person's name. Taking the card to the police or the bank would get a call directly to them. Who would think, I'm going to start a chain of 1 penny transaction to contact this person at this bank account, and hope they get them before they cancel their bank account because they lost their wallet. And is this a wallet with cash and a single card with no identifiable information on it? NOTHING else? EDIT: Because I can't reply below: because they have access to that bank account now. Pretty simple. The card in question is said to have their banking info right on the card, so you close that account and start a new one.

chrisseaton 7y ago

But this is a standard bank account and transfer? This is the old way of doing things, not his new way.

smcl 7y ago

Don’t ignore your bullshit-ometer on social media platforms, it’s rarely wrong.

timcameron 7y ago

Hi, I’m the guy who lost his wallet! I agree it’s a convenient overlap and understand your cynicism but I assure you that it’s genuine. I can even provide you with the receipt from me riding a jump bike around for an hour looking for my wallet! :) EDIT: spelling + I did pin the tweet about transferwise after it blew up, and I also changed my bio to share my small side project: Podmast.com - check it out :)

benatkin 7y ago
That's what someone who does this kind of thing would say. I'm not saying I think it's fake, but I think it might be. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and posting a defense isn't evidence. Edit: I wondered if I got this slogan right, and it turns out to have a name - The Sagan Standard! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard
- ztratar 7y ago
  The amount of cynicism is too damn high!
  - benatkin 7y ago
    I'm not all that cynical about it. I don't think that people (micro-)blogging made up stories (which this may or may not be) means there's something terribly wrong with them. It's a white lie told repeatedly with a straight face. It's worse than a white lie told once, but not as bad as a more directly harmful lie like faking an illness and collecting money from strangers on GoFundMe.
- braythwayt 7y ago
  > That's what someone who does this kind of thing would say. Speaking of cynicism, this argument is known as an Ad Hominem Circumstantial: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/9/Ad-Hominem-Circumstantial https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...
dpcan 7y ago

patio11 7y ago

For what it is worth, I saw this story and thought "Oh, I love this; creative use of metadata in the payments system", principally because I am professionally involved with payments. All the "coincidences" here are explainable by "people who geek out on X will tend to see a lot more X in their daily lives than civilians and will become focal points for other people who geek out on X, who see a lot more X in their daily lives than civilians." You can trivially reproduce "OMG banks!" on any social media feed you control; just kvetch in public about a banking story. Also, there are people on HN who do marketing for a living (checks business cards including me?), and to the extent that you model someone as going into their planning meeting with "OK guys I have this great idea for how to hit our Q4 numbers: lets do stealthmarketing on our personal Twitter accounts", you should know that that would not receive the reply "Genius Bob, why do we employ teams of expensive professionals to do this when you come up with such pearls of wisdom for free." Mentioning this half because excessive cynicism is a failure mode for geeks and half because many people on HN will, at some point in their life, actually have to get good at causing people to adopt a product or service, and HNers should correct the mental model that would suggest that this is in any way aimed at or effective at causing adoption of a product or service.

natural219 7y ago
I guess we can assume by this that TransferWise is patio11 approved :D
TulliusCicero 7y ago
Reflexive cynicism is a simple, easy way of asserting intellectual superiority over others without directly insulting them. Super common in internet comments, including, arguably, this one. It's vastly less complicated to just assume and assert that everything is bullshit everywhere, all the time, than to actually try to discern where cynicism and optimism are each warranted.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >Reflexive cynicism is a simple, easy way of asserting intellectual superiority over others without directly insulting them. Super common in internet comments, including, arguably, this one. Or maybe it's a natural adaptation to a world where almost everybody seems to have some ulterior motive. Edit: a word

braythwayt 7y ago

Be all that as it may, in a world where people use their Wi-Fi SSIDs to say nasty things to their neighbours, I totally buy that this story is plausible.

tripzilch 7y ago
Or set your phone to hotspot mode and transmit a poop emoji everywhere you go! It's the little things in life ...

bpsh 7y ago

Just want to chime in to tell any prospective new Transferwise customer that my experience with the company has been dreadful. They can for no reason deactivate your account with funds still remaining. That’s not the problem though, it is that their appeals teams takes over 2 weeks to respond per message. Yep, waited 3 weeks to get an answer for deactivation. Another 3 weeks to convince them it was an error. Now it has been a month since I sent in my supporting documents and no reply yet. Think I might have to file a formal complaint at this point.

dang 7y ago

There's a softer version of this intuition: a guy who works for Transferwise would be more likely to write a blog post about something like this when it happened to him.

MildlySerious 7y ago

It's not noteworthy all of itself, things get unproportional amounts of attention all the time on the internet, but I find it interesting that this story then ended up on the very top of HN

incompatible 7y ago

Hacking payment transfers to send messages can be used for "good or evil". I recently read about somebody using it to harass an ex-partner.

woutr_be 7y ago

To be a bit more cynical, every time I see those generic "change the world" and cheeky "office dogs" things listed as a reason to work there, I can't help think; "you really couldn't come up with any meaningful reasons to work there?" Maybe I've already gone through enough shitty startups to not fall for it anymore, or maybe I'm just a cynical guy in general.

puranjay 7y ago

I understand the cynicism, but at this point, Transferwise isn't a scrappy startup and I can't see any reason why they'd want to pull off such a PR stunt. They're valued at $3.5B. $3.5B companies don't "fake lose" their wallets to get to the top of HN