So, if I want to disrupt a competitor all I have to do is hire a bunch of darknet identify thieves and you'll shut down their merchant account?
I think one method of protection would be using Stripes Radar service to screen transactions for malicious patterns.
While it probably won’t catch all fraudulent charges, it’ll catch a bunch. You can use that increase in rejected transactions as a canary to take a closer look at the other transactions coming through.
Does anyone else have ideas on how you can protect yourself from this kind of attack?
Edit: thinking about this more, it would be a pretty expensive attack to attempt. Stolen credit cards aren't cheap, like email addresses are. You'd need a lot of them to attempt the attack and you likely wouldn't succeed.
I think you'd need 1% of the target merchant's transactions to be chargebacks in order to get them kicked off. I'd assume at least 50% of your attempts would get caught before the chargeback even happens, so you'd need at least 2% of their transactions.
Seems like you'd need a large number of cards. Anyone know the value of a stolen card?
I also remember something about bulk sales.
If you never intend to capitalize on the gains other then an attack vector it would minimize the risk.
So eliminating someone’s business is 2% revenue * 25$ usd optimally.
Surely we can build a better service to get these costs down.
Like, “So, if I want to disrupt a competitor, all I have to do is hire thugs to smash all their stuff?”
Yeah, that’d do it. Good luck.
This attack is also not protected by insurance, like someone setting fire to your office would be.
It’s fair to explore just how vulnerable a company can be to this type of attack from a malicious competitor.
You can also pull API keys from most apps and get them banned from advertising networks.
You can hire people to review bomb.
Hire people to make fake news about a competitor go viral.
Someone willing to do illegal things can always hire other people to do illegal things for them "anonymously"