Hacker News Reader

Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

Besides, you can ban credit card number of abusers. It's easy to create an email, it's harder to get a new credit card.

It’s not hard at all to get a new credit card. Report it lost and get a new one. In the US I’ve never seen a bank charge for it, and several times have simply gotten a new one sent to me unprompted because the bank had been informed the card was compromised. Sure it’s not the same as creating a new gmail account, but it’s still incredibly easy.

Also, banning credit card numbers is going to be problematic... most smaller operations are not (and should not) be handling their own payment processing and should never have access to card info. Even if you do and you hash it to match against that’s iffy from a security perspective and would likely run afoul of any decent PCI auditor.

Stripe will give you a “fingerprint” of a card that you’re allowed to do whatever you want with, and recommend that you use that to block cards.

Yep. You can either write code for it or use Radar to block the charge by fingerprint (write a rule once in your Stripe dashboard to block cards on a blocklist, add a fingerprint to the list when you identify an abusive customer, done). This lets you block a card without ever contaminating yourself with knowledge of its number (we expose the fingerprint in a variety of places to you, like API responses or on the charge detail page in the Dashboard).

https://stripe.com/docs/radar/lists

French here, but isn't it a typo ?

"Use this list with so payments by these customers are always allowed automatically."

Thanks, will get it fixed.

Appart from the obvious benefit of not storing the credit card yourself, I imagine if a user switch cards, the number change and we are back to the same.

You can actually get new credit card numbers generated super easy. There are services that will give you a unique credit card number to use at every online retailer to limit your risk of theft.

I don't think most people realize that those services limit you to one number per vendor in most cases, so they don't get banned for enabling fraud.

I used to use Paypal’s digital card service before they discontinued it. I’m surprised this isn’t more popular in the US, it’s in the bank’s interest to help you limit everyone’s risk.

A lot of credit cards offer it still. My favorite card, my Citi Double Cash, does.

https://www.cardbenefits.citi.com/Products/Virtual-Account-N...

>It’s not hard at all to get a new credit card.

It's not really hard but it certainly is an inconvenience, especially if you're going to rip off a video game dev. It would take a lot of dedication and resources to exploit OP's policy, and pretty much no one would do it is the point.

I would also think that in cases like this you’re dealing with an indie dev who you’re never going to purchase something from again anyway. Steam would never have a refund policy like this, so the issue becomes moot.

Privacy cards allow you to generate new cards whenever you want, even pause or 'destroy' them whenever you need. A merchant can block the cards that come from that service though. Merchants such as Supreme NY, but Privacy has claimed they have found a way around that.

I need to use this for trials that I will probably forget about. Bookmarking now.

If the trial takes PayPal you can also reject authorization for automatic payments in PayPal.

Just be aware that blocking the payment doesn't necessarily cancel the service so you can end up in collections if you don't cancel in rare cases (like if you signed a term contract)

Wanted to try it, but it's US only unfortunatly.

I have over 20 credit cards, its hardly difficult to get a new one. Combine that with services like privacy.com and Bank of America ShopSafe and credit card numbers can be infinitely generated.

> Besides, you can ban credit card number of abusers. It's easy to create an email, it's harder to get a new credit card.

Several CC issuers offer virtual card numbers for online purchases you can generate many #s with one card easily

Reply on news.ycombinator.com