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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

I actually had a similar conclusion originally, but then I also saw the level of fraud by our UK customers. They where maybe 5 - 10% of our total sales, but 90+% of fraud cases.

My take away is simply that there's less trust in the British society as a whole and it's not necessarily a fault or problem isolated to a single company.

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It may be a bit of both, but indeed from anecdotal evidence starting a company in the UK and in the Netherlands: A lot of things are set up with less thrust in the UK. As a simple example in the Netherlands if you reclaim VAT as a company tax services just gives you the money and checks later (obviously you need to give it back if it wasn't correct). In the UK you'll need to show invoices, proof etc before HMRC pays you.

Similar for insurance, car insurance in many European countries is done in 1 minute online just an update to a database. In the UK you need a sticker on your car, people that check the stickers etc.

Matches the data shown here:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attit...

China is kinda funny. Either the question was misunderstood, or they've answered what they know should be the right answer. Everyone I know who as been trained in dealing with Chinese suppliers or business partners is telling me that you can only trust the Chinese as long as their financial interests are aligned with yours.

I wonder how neighbors would answer those questions. Would Americans say Canadians are more trustworthy? Or would Colombians say that about Venezuelans?

Yeah, that is very strange. My experience echoes yours - I think there's a relatively speaking weak default trust between strangers in China.

Chinese colleagues have told me that trust in others is very low in China, that family matters much more than society in general. It can make doing business more expensive and slower in China compared to say Scandinavia where levels of trust are generally very high.

> Similar for insurance, car insurance in many European countries is done in 1 minute online just an update to a database. In the UK you need a sticker on your car, people that check the stickers etc.

You don't need any such sticker in the UK? There used to be a sticker for road tax, but that was done away with. And having a road tax sticker on car windscreens is common across Europe - there were worries at the time the UK got rid of the sticker that motorists would be stopped when on the continent because of not having a sticker.

If anything the truth of your example shows the opposite from what you intend.

Your comment about car insurance is incorrect. Actually in the UK you do not need to carry any evidence of insurance, MOT, or your licence. If you are stopped, you have 14 days to present it to a police station. Which I think is actually evidence for the exact opposite of what you are describing.

Road tax used to be sticker based (as it is in many many counties), but is also now just an online database edit.

False about the VAT in the UK at least for small and medium companies. You need to keep but not show records and you have to say how much is owed you, just like in the Netherlands I imagine.

It's not checked later unless you get audited which is uncommon generally.

False also about road tax.

Perhaps your anecdotes were from a couple of decades ago?

Something I learned very quickly the first time I started a business doing online sales to a global market is that while it might be very un-PC to talk about entire nations or cultures with stereotypes, there certainly are patterns in how people from different countries behave, and there certainly are some places where it may be economically justified to decline all sales because the risk of fraud or other abuse is so high.

The UK has never been a particular problem for us in that respect. Maybe that's because it's our home country and we are somehow more appealing in how we present ourselves. Maybe it's the market we're in. Maybe our pricing model makes it less worthwhile to try to rip us off if you have a typical UK income. Unfortunately there isn't any truly reliable way to determine why people from some places are so much higher risk than others. But the numbers don't lie.

FWIW, I think the Germans are probably the best customers we've had. IME, they're invariably courteous and very rarely cause trouble. And even on the rare occasion when a German breaks our rules (probably unintentionally due to a language barrier or the like) the response to a polite message informing them of such and asking them to stop is usually a polite apology and immediately correcting whatever inappropriate behaviour was happening. So there are definitely cultural outliers in positive directions as well as negative ones.

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