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Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

If PayPal wants to mitigate risky transactions, give us a good mechanism to report fraudulent ones. I reverse dozens of donations to my open source project every month that are obviously fraudulent (testing a stolen credit card to see if it works). I have no way to report it to Mastercard/VISA or the cardholder. I have to reverse it or I get hit with a $20 chargeback fee on that fraudulent $1 donation. And when I reverse it, PayPal keeps their fee, so that has to come out of our funds.

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FYI, there is no mention of "risk" in the submitted article, it's purely about copyright policing. You appear to be responding to misinformation posted by some commenters here.

You might have to institute a minimum donation amount, and link to a page explaining why. And I honestly don't think it will matter much if the minimum donation has to be $3 instead of $1 due to fraudulent charges & fees

Better yet - disable credit card donations and stick to just PayPal accounts. A set of people who are willing to donate, have a credit card, but not a PP account is vanishingly small.

The day would be rather bleak if paypal had monopoly on who can donate to whom. I would on principle never donate to such project, and hope that they would at least consider opening up an alternative method like bank transfer or bitcoins.

[Citation needed]

I've had nothing but trouble with PayPal. I give them another shot every year or three, but invariably have to jump through piles of hoops to make a first payment, if I'm successful at all. So generally end up using a card directly. Because PayPal is terrible.

It's the price of operation on the internet. There are more avenues of abuse and so they have to be very strict. This resulted in a lot of frustrations from the users, but there is nobody doing better.

I'm not sure that is true. I suspect it has a lot to do with the market. Anywhere that ebay dominates the online auction / trading business - maybe. Elsewhere, (such as NZ where ebay use is dwarfed by trademe) paypal account holders won't be nearly as common.

Paypal provide fraud management filters via the API. Payments can be flagged based on a variety of criteria and automatically rejected or held pending until they are manually reviewed. If you require more sophisticated fraud management tools, I would suggest using a payment gateway service.

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/fmf/integration-gu...

> If you require more sophisticated fraud management tools, I would suggest using a payment gateway service.

PayPal is a payment gateway... In the case you mean payment processor... Stripe's antifraud is pathetic at best (sorry, love you guys). BrainTree isn't any better. Authorize.net is bottom-barrel. "Let's add MaxMind!" not helping, it's trivial to circumvent.

Nothing can defeat a human, and nobody can be 100% about detecting a fraudulent transaction. The things that kill you are the things that a payment gateway doesn't look at.

My history is littered with circumventing the rules, bending them and breaking them. I'm a "student of the game" if you will (well, not anymore, I now help prevent and detect), and there are things that I've developed/learned/executed/manipulated into getting a transaction through that was so stupid simple that I laughed when I saw the words "order confirmation."

Please, please don't trust your payment processor or gateway to be enough to prevent fraudulent transactions. They're good for the 90% of carders who are idiots. The remaining 9% are the ones that will hurt you, and that last 1% are the ones that will kill your business.

LOL. I see you around all the time man. You and I are always preaching the same story.

Maybe we should get the band together.

Just curious, what makes them obviously fraudulent?

likely their size, the originating IPs (american cards being used from places like Russia, or known tor nodes) and past similar examples.

Its a common tactic for carders to throw $1 at something to test cards before they try to use them for something more expensive.

Add it to Stubhub, but don't submit a payment. Tests validity without causing an issue to the card.

There are untold thousands of ways to beat whatever systems get put in place to stop them.

Do you accept Bitcoin? Irreversibility is a Godsend for merchants.

We accept Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Doge. It accounts for less than 1% of our donations/donors.

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