

How we fight credit card fraud at Watsi - chaseadam17
http://i.imgur.com/TW9hNoH.png

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patio11
For people wondering "What possible reason would someone run fraudulent credit
cards through _a charity_?", the answer is:

1) Most stolen credit cards are sold, generally in large blocks.

2) The value of a stolen credit card is highly dependent on a few factors,
including most saliently age since acquisition (since they're increasingly
likely to be discovered and canceled over time) and whether they've been
recently vetted or not (since otherwise the market is a market for non-working
lemons, where you cream off known-good cards and sell known-bad cards).

3) Putting a transaction through any merchant which actually runs the card and
returns a result will successfully vet the card. Charities, Internet startups,
and Internet startup charities are all known to have lower-than-average risk
screens in place, so they're preferentially abused for this.

A credit card fraud ring used BCC for same reasons earlier this year, by
buying it through our Paypal buy now button. We reversed ~60 transactions
before I (apparently?) successfully convinced the Paypal live security team to
bring the hammer down on them.

P.S. Watsi folks, you should talk to Gumroad or SiftScience. Both of them are
YC companies (so I rather suspect both would help you out under a frieNDA or
something) and both have ideas which would work for you.

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cpach
Any background on what this is about?

