Hacker News Reader

My experience with card company fraud detection systems is that they were bafflingly useless. Maybe they've gotten better recently. But even Stripe seems to let through things that are obvious fraud, stuff that wouldn't pass a basic spam filter.

It's almost like they want to charge you those fees!

Yeah, I agree. I guess their argument is that it's difficult to catch every single fraud attempt, and in this case the behaviour was just not picked up by the processor's inbuilt fraud detection systems. Still, it should be the processor's responsibility.

GoCardless (Direct Debit, EU only at the moment) is one company that doesn't charge a fee for chargebacks. They take on all the risk themselves.

Alternatively, small companies started by developers should stop thinking they can implement the payment and order handling code themselves, and learn that instead they should use a service that does this for them.