
BillGuard - Straubiz
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/07/billguard.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AVc+%28A+VC%29
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davidw
> They asked me for my credit card website logins, I provided them, and they
> took down all the transactions

Now _that_ would make a juicy, tempting target for a hacker.

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aristidb
Yeah, no matter how useful, you just can't give third-party services your bank
logins.

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pdenya
Isn't this the same way mint.com and other similar services access your
financial data?

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aristidb
This is the reason that I would not use Mint.com, yes. (Also it isn't
available in my country.)

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tzs
I'd like to see a similar service, but for merchants. That is, instead of
alerting consumers to bad credit card charges, alert merchants to bad
consumers.

For instance, there are consumers who if they decide they no longer what to
subscribe to your service don't bother trying to cancel--they just call their
bank and claim they don't recognize the charge, and so generate a chargeback
to the merchant. (This is bad for the merchant because not only do they have
to give back the money, they get hit with a charge back fee in the $15-30
range...in fact they get hit with the fee even if the successfully challenge
the charge back).

The idea would be when merchants make a sale, they would report to the service
a hash of the credit card number, the amount of the charge, what kind of
merchant they are, what kind of good or service was purchased, whether this
was an initial charge or part of a recurring service, and whether the charge
was accepted or declined. If a customer of theirs charges back or refunds, the
merchant would report that, and whether or not it was reasonable.

From this data, the service could develop a profile for each card concerning
its refund and charge back behavior. The service could also develop a profile
of the merchants, noting merchants that have unusually high charge back and
refund rates, and so weight data from those merchants less when developing the
card profiles.

Merchants, before accepting a credit card, could query the service and get a
report on that card's charge back and refund behavior.

One might note that some of this seems similar to the systems the banks
already have in place to detect fraud. It is, but those systems are not for
the benefit of the merchant. They are primarily for the bank's protection and
secondarily for the consumer's protection. The system I'm suggesting would be
for the merchant's benefit and protection.

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tomjen3
The problem with that is that it would make consumers concerned about
reporting merchants who were actually fraudulent.

In addition, many (most) merchants make it difficult to cancel so consumers
don't even attempt.

Merchants brought this to themselves.

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devicenull
There are a number of consumers that abuse the chargeback process in order to
get a service without paying for it, or to get a refund on something when they
accepted an agreement saying it was non-refundable. It's pretty difficult for
companies to fight fraudulent chargebacks, and I believe they get charged for
it even if it's overturned.

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singer
What about looking up consumers via email address instead? Some consumers
would get around that by using a different email address, but I bet the
majority of consumers consistently use the same email address when making
purchases online.

