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Comment by timcameron | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I’m the guy who lost his wallet! I agree it’s a convenient overlap and understand your cynicism but I assure you that it’s genuine. I can even provide you with the receipt from me riding a jump bike around for an hour looking for my wallet! :)

EDIT: spelling + I did pin the tweet about transferwise after it blew up, and I also changed my bio to share my small side project: Podmast.com - check it out :)

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Thanks for dropping in. Sorry if that actually happened to you. The sad thing is when much of tech is dedicated to churning attention capital into financial capital in an ever-more-clever cat-and-mouse game, one stops being able to trust anything that grabs one's attention. Or, at least every social interaction starts to feel purely transactional. It's a shitty social dystopia we're building for ourselves.

Whichever way your story went, thanks for the neat tale of what can be done with bank transfers! Glad it worked out.

Just post the thread from the slack channel at work where you obviously posted this story :p

I've seen that thread, it's funny :) Even I thought this is too perfect story as a co-worker, but it is.

*assure

Whoops thanks.

That's what someone who does this kind of thing would say.

I'm not saying I think it's fake, but I think it might be. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and posting a defense isn't evidence.

Edit: I wondered if I got this slogan right, and it turns out to have a name - The Sagan Standard! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard

The amount of cynicism is too damn high!

I'm not all that cynical about it. I don't think that people (micro-)blogging made up stories (which this may or may not be) means there's something terribly wrong with them. It's a white lie told repeatedly with a straight face. It's worse than a white lie told once, but not as bad as a more directly harmful lie like faking an illness and collecting money from strangers on GoFundMe.

> That's what someone who does this kind of thing would say.

Speaking of cynicism, this argument is known as an Ad Hominem Circumstantial:

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...

You're making it worse.

Anyone can conveniently lose a wallet, but one with a bank card with no identifying info in it anywhere? A finder who went to bizarre lengths to make Faster transactions to your bank account to send you a message? Absolutely no other identifying information in the wallet? A plan to ride a jump bike around to prove you looked for it with receipts?

Before sending someone pennies with context in the transactions, hoping that person would get them before they canceled all their bank accounts because they lost their wallet, I would just take the card to the bank and have them call the owner, or take it to the police and they'd do the same.

Uhg, sorry, "I ensure you" and "jump bike receipts" is not enough to convince me.

EDIT: Removed the quotes from Faster, my point seemed to get lost because of that.

Unless something changed pretty much all payments in the UK are “Faster”.

Salary payments are typically still BACS and I think Faster does have a transaction limit in the 10’s of thousands of pounds range.

IIRC the limit according to the standard is £100,000/day but most banks impose their own arbitrary limit. Assuming things haven't changed in 5 years, this[1] lists the limits for a lot of banks. I can also add to the list that Monzo's is £10,000/day.

1. https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2014/11/customers-bei...

BACS is generally cheaper at volume. In addition, BACS Bureau allows a payroll company to transfer money directly from your employer's account to yours without the money ever reaching their account.

All fixable, but payroll companies are generally chosen on price, not innovation.

Anyone can say anything they want on the internet! The variables here are conveniently precisely aligned where real world chances of this happening are null. I also call BS. But a noteworthy mention to the marketing idea. With all due respect.

Faster Payments is a UK banking thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service

Faster Payments is the standard, free way of making payments to bank accounts in the UK. Everyone with online banking here has easy access to it regardless of what bank they use. Also, our debit cards generally have enough information to send someone a payment that way for some reason.

Um, this is how banking works in the UK. Nobody cancels their bank account if they lose their card, they just cancel their card. And given someone else's card I could send them 1p within a minute (even if it's cancelled). Now I've seen this approach, it's what I'll do next time. And it doesn't involve the poster's company in any way, transferring thousands of pounds instantly within the EU is trivial.

Also in a lot of cases these days you don't even have to cancel the card.

If you're like "Oops, that's gone" and it fell into a waterfall or something then, sure, you cancel it and have a replacement sent, but say you just got back from the store and it isn't in your wallet. You call a modern bank. "Hi, I think I lost my card maybe?" Good chance they say - "OK, we'll freeze the card, call us if you find it or if you give up and we'll send a new one".

Both my accounts I just freeze it in the app, but yes, quite.

> Now I've seen this approach, it's what I'll do next time

I'd suggest calling or sending it to the bank instead. I'm sure they can find its owner with a lot less hassle than this.

Both of those options would take longer and be more effort, but I've only find someone else's cards 3 times in 40 years...

In the UK the details needed to transfer money into an account are on most bank cards (Account Number and Sort Code), so that's enough identifying info.

That would also mean someone can send you money if your card is blocked or cancelled. Account number and sort code don't change when you get a new card.

Also, "Faster Payments" is the name of the normal system to transfer money between accounts in the UK. It doesn't cost the sender anything other than the money they send. It's called "faster" because the old system was a lot slower (because it was based on paper I think?).

I'm curious about this. I've always banked with NatWest so I'm only really familiar with their cards, but my bank account number is definitely not printed on the card (the sort code is).

Do some other UK banks really print the account numbers on their cards? Or is there some way to send a Faster payment to a debit card number?

Just checked my Halifax Visa Debit card... Contains my name, visa card number, sort code and bank account number.

My personal Barclays debit card has sort code and account number. My RBS business debit card has sort code and company name only.

In my case, I have two card from one bank has sort code and account number. I also have one card from a different bank has none of that.

I'm with Starling Bank, and along with the usual Mastercard numbers (card number, expiry, CVV etc.) it has the account number... though not the sort code, strangely. I guess you could look it up if you wanted to, but you'd need to know this 8-digit number with no label was the account number. Weird.

I think Natwest is the outlier in this case. I've always had my account number and sort code on all my cards with other banks (Barclays, Lloyds, Halifax).

Edit: Maybe also Monzo, no account number on that one.

Pretty sure my Natwest debit card has my account number and sort code on it.

The old system (BACS) has been electronic since 1983, or possibly even 1968 when it was introduced. (Wikipedia is unclear, it seems transactions were recorded on magnetic tape for the first 15 years, before using phone lines.) It slowly replaces the paper based system: cheques.

The 2-3 days got the old system will have been a limitation of batch based computer processing from that time, and maybe moving the magnetic tapes around.

Would you please review the site guidelines? They include "Assume good faith."

The cost of getting this wrong is much higher than the benefit of getting it right, and in our experience the probability is higher too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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