Hacker News Reader

Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

> so for each of the purchase I created a new virtual card and bought them. After a few minutes my Amazon account is blocked for suspicious activity, and ALL my kindle library is wiped, and the funds are returned to my company.

I understand generating a virtual card for a per company basis, but what's the point of generating a card for every book you're buying? Besides the added hassle for little benefit, surely you can understand why such behavior might be considered "suspicious"?

View on HN

Guessing that the virtual cards are only able to be used for a single purchase. And because there is no shopping cart on Kindle allowing books to be bought together, multiple cards were required for the individual purchases.

From what I have used my virtual card for my Apple Card that seems correct. Virtual cards really should be generated once per purchase because if you aren't doing this its going to trigger a fraud detection system for the payment processor.

Yes, this is correct.

It sounded odd to me as well, seems to be just the way their spend management solution works: https://www.spendesk.com/en/product/virtual-cards.

Why would it be considered suspicious?

Could be a person testing out stolen cards with a low-value purchase, to verify that the cards are legitimate. They then can use them elsewhere for much larger purchases.

Usually when someone uses lots of different cards to make purchases on a website, they're testing stolen cards. 2-3 cards is fine, but if you have over ~5 cards in a day, it's over 90% chance that they're stolen. You simply don't run an ecommerce platform of any size without a system to automatically flag and block those transactions.

I haven't checked the logs, but I guarantee there have been people/bots trying to do card testing on our site in the past 24 hours. It's pretty nearly a non-stop barrage, so you have to auto-detect and auto-block.

Exactly this, especially for small purchases like ebooks. This was a big fraud signal for us, I think over 5 cards would auto flag every subsequent order for human review. Probably the most effective signal we had.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com