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Comment by iooi | Hacker News Reader

So if KitSplit explicitly absolves itself from liability, what is the benefit of that platform over Craigslist? At least with CL you wouldn't have to pay KitSplit a fee.

Their fees certainly aren't going towards liability insurance or fraud detection, so what are they doing with those fees?

I bet the fraud rate at KitSplit is going to go up after this post. Now you have a list of people that will wake up at 7am to hand over $4k of gear to you, knowing that KitSplit won't do anything and neither will law enforcement. Just remember to cancel your credit card and you'll make a quick $2k!

In all seriousness, if KitSplit wanted to stop this just charge renters a hefty deposit (the approximate cost of resell) and it should nip this in the bud. Obviously, someone in their "Growth" team will point out that this will hurt their KPIs and their VCs might not like it, so they won't do it.

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Yeah I was wondering why they don't enforce a deposit up front.

The CC is likely stolen. Any deposit or replacement fee will be disputed by the actual owner and charged back.

I was guessing it was a pre-paid card that just barely had the balance to cover the rental fee.

Most places block pre-paid cards for purposes like this (although I have seen Stripe report a card initially as non-pre-paid and then later revise it to say pre-paid).

But do they block temporary cards generated by Monzo?

As far as I am aware Address verification is the only way to perform a fraud check and block prepaid cards. Maybe stripe can use some collective intelligence for certain card numbers but it would be a lagging indicator of fraud.

Not really, there are different BINs issued for prepaid card.

This is not an excuse. A company making any effort to be legitimate should use one of the several identity verification services available in combination with any sort of nontrivial fraud detection, which should easily dissuade 99.9% of thieves. At 22% rental fees, the service can easily afford to cover theft that slips the net.

Given that KitSplit doesn't even disable the account of known thieves, it seems pretty clearly a case of malice (or, more accurately, greed, which in this case has the same net effect), not incompetence.

Which is why they should be sued out of existence.

> A company making any effort to be legitimate should use one of the several identity verification services available in combination with any sort of nontrivial fraud detection, which should easily dissuade 99.9% of thieves.

Not so. Thieves aren't stupid. They try a few times to figure out the system, then steal the identity of someone else (who is legit and passes fraud and credit checks) to do the actual theft.

The portability of the gear, combined with it's high resale value, means rentals will never work for an online business.

While this is certainly true for a few thieves, at least for other high-fraud industries, it's a case of running away from a bear - you just have to be harder to defraud then the other guy (in this case, other online marketplaces). Additionally, it's both more difficult to obtain an identity (particularly if locality is required to pass fraud checks) (whereas stolen CCs can easily be purchased in bulk) and not necessarily sufficient - for example, if the fraudster's contact number is verified against their identity, it again increases the threshold.

If the thieves have access to a local, legit person's CC, identity, and phone, then yes, you can't really stop them from stealing.

TransferWise once requested a webcam interview and verified my ID using that.

How can a a theif fake an interview?

>This is not an excuse.

It's not supposed to be an excuse for anything. The GP asked why they didn't take a deposit and my response was to argue why that's pointless.

The difference being that KickSplit's insurance would cover that loss.

It's more likely KickSplit doesn't want to introduce friction for potential renters. $3,500 is a large deposit for someone who just wants to pay $75 rent on a few hours of use.

I really don't think that's an unreasonable amount. Most people are renting this equipment for professional use and should easily be able to put that money down.

The reason I'd rent such equipment would be that I couldn't afford to own it. I would not handle it uninsured, of course, but I'd likely not pay to insure it against it getting stolen from me. That risk I'd eat and compensate with suitable security measures.

But putting those charges on your card within your credit limit and credit period doesn't cost much.

Can't afford would mean needing insurance, or selling/pawning property. Proper vetting enables you to use the threat of criminal prosecution and civil restitution to indirectly use the customer's remaining property as collateral.

You only need to secure a deposit which covers the black-market price of the equipment.

So probably ~30% of face value.

Charge a new credit card sign-up fee, which is then refunded after a couple weeks. Only allow rentals on cards that have gone through this process with no charge-backs or fraud complaints.

Only allow renters to bypass this process for a new card if they have an established and positive rental record.

I thought most equipment rental places do this. Also, clearly this is a high-fraud risk business line, why aren't there safeguards in the credit approval process? It's not hard to do these days.

> what is the benefit of that platform over Craigslist

You get to read claims and promises how safe you'll be on their web site.

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