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I think the biggest issue with the entire field is not respecting the users. They're treated as potential criminals, their livelihoods and money are not respect

by cptaj 6y ago

I think the biggest issue with the entire field is not respecting the users. They're treated as potential criminals, their livelihoods and money are not respected at all, they have no recourse to protest administrative action, etc. Its a terrible experience overall. It has gotten better but still leaves a lot to be desired

PeterisP 6y ago
Just like there's no way around the fact that a large portion of email is spam, there's no way around the fact that in the field of receiving money on internet, a substantial niche of potential users actually are criminals. Their volume of transactions is quite large, they are sophisticated and eager to try out new services, and they can rapidly direct the flow of (many) fraudulent payments to a new payment service provider or scale the exploitation of some cash-out system to thousands of accounts managed dozens of actual people (generally 'money mules' who get scammed themselves). So if your service is friendly to that group of customers, no matter if accidentally through some process flaw or intentionally (because you're not treating criminals creating accounts as potential criminals), then you can (and will) suddenly get a lot of criminal activity. For a small service, as soon as organized criminals notice that your policies allow them to use you for making fraudulent transactions, they can quickly bring in much more transactions that any of your marketing activities. The general result of doing what you propose is that it works until criminals notice a particular vulnerability in your processes/policies caused by excessive trust in users, and then suddenly you get a LOT of fraudulent activity which makes all your operations unviable. I've seen small merchants get a tenfold increase in transactions over a single week, with all of that increase being fraud, enabled by some weakness that is massively exploited until they close the weakness. Or close their business - for a small business, a single major fraud campaign can easily be enough to bankrupt them.

by cptaj 6y ago

PeterisP 6y ago

Just like there's no way around the fact that a large portion of email is spam, there's no way around the fact that in the field of receiving money on internet, a substantial niche of potential users actually are criminals. Their volume of transactions is quite large, they are sophisticated and eager to try out new services, and they can rapidly direct the flow of (many) fraudulent payments to a new payment service provider or scale the exploitation of some cash-out system to thousands of accounts managed dozens of actual people (generally 'money mules' who get scammed themselves). So if your service is friendly to that group of customers, no matter if accidentally through some process flaw or intentionally (because you're not treating criminals creating accounts as potential criminals), then you can (and will) suddenly get a lot of criminal activity. For a small service, as soon as organized criminals notice that your policies allow them to use you for making fraudulent transactions, they can quickly bring in much more transactions that any of your marketing activities. The general result of doing what you propose is that it works until criminals notice a particular vulnerability in your processes/policies caused by excessive trust in users, and then suddenly you get a LOT of fraudulent activity which makes all your operations unviable. I've seen small merchants get a tenfold increase in transactions over a single week, with all of that increase being fraud, enabled by some weakness that is massively exploited until they close the weakness. Or close their business - for a small business, a single major fraud campaign can easily be enough to bankrupt them.