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Comment by DreamFlasher | Hacker News Reader

I am surprised that this blog post went through legal including this detail (https://archive.md/ZD1zc): In the next paragraph they write the fraud rate "on the order of 1 out of every 1,000 payments.", so their false positive rate is as high as the fraud rate.

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I wonder what makes false negatives so costly for them, that they're willing to accept so many false positives.

Chargebacks are very costly, and it isn't all that high a false positive rate at all given what they are doing (processing payments). In fact some of their competitors would be very happy with that rate.

A false positive costs them nothing but the fees on a single transaction. A false negative costs the entire value of the transaction plus legal and administrative costs.

And possibly their merchant account if there are enough of those.

Reputation. Have you not seen that post that pops up every three months or so about how some startup had their funds "stolen" (whether true or not) by Stripe?

I would have thought, those are the result of false positives, i.e. when fraud is "detected" where there (at least allegedly) is none.

I would be very careful interpreting those stories without having more than just one side.

The post is about a project called Radar. Do you believe this is what is responsible for those complaints?

0.1% of Stripe blog posts don't go through legal.

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