Comment by Keverw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Keverw | Hacker News Reader

Very neat, reminds me of how like PayPal makes 2 small deposits to verify your bank account. Only downside I'd think to this is fees for the site owner(but might offset chargebacks if their site had a bunch in the past so maybe worth it) and then secondly not everyone uses online banking...

Like I know someone who's a family member who still does online shopping like on Amazon but still gets their credit card and bank statements mailed to them - unless you can maybe check your card balance and recent transactions by phone... They say they don't trust online banking, yet it's literally probably the same database and servers other than a flag in the database like "hasOnlineAccess" with a username/password combo stored... Probably more at risk of getting their info stolen by installing crap on their own computer than the bank itself being hacked though.

Thanks for the feedback and story!

Our recommendation is that most businesses should be prepared to offer a few options for payment or identity verification. In your case, your family member may have been better suited doing something like a drivers license verification or a knowledge-based identification.

You're welcome. I been toying around with doing a virtual world, but still far away from doing the economy related stuff. One of my concerns is some teenager might steal their parents credit card and rack up charges, maybe multiple ones. and from my understanding chargebacks are about 30 bucks each. Then I think offering game tokens or gift cards, criminals buy a bunch of gift cards to resell with stolen cards. Then worried about trolls, I was thinking of the idea of charging people to signup but some friends thought that'd hinder growth... Tricky stuff to think about, but can't monetize it yet without the other stuff working yet anyways. Even heard of criminals using charities donation forms to try and verify cards too, pretty shameful since in a way they are stealing from the children or people with cancer the charity is trying to help out since other funds would have to help cover the chargebacks.

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