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Comment by _ph_ | Hacker News Reader

A strange story. I cannot understand why the police isn't looking into it. At minimum, there would be a credit card number for each order which could be traced. There should be phone records. If this goes via a payment processor, they should flag the addresses. The fact that the orders happen to two persons in parallel basically rules out any randomness in the process.

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They are meant to be paid cash at the door as far as I understand. What I don’t understand is why the pizza places can’t just stop taking orders for that address. There must be a finite number of pizza places within delivery range.

Something stinks about this

I doubt there are credit cards involved; the article mentions that he refuses delivery each time so he's never had to pay for anything, so I assume they're cash-on-delivery.

Europe doesn't do the credit card thing to the same degree as in the US; cash purchases, especially for things like this, are much more the norm.

It depends, Europe is quite diverse. For example, practically everything is paid by card in the Netherlands, but cash is used in Spain. Although in these covid times, everything has to be paid by card everywhere I know.

Again, it depends. E.g. in Switzerland you can still pay using cash.

But in the Netherlands food (and other online purchases) are nearly universally done with the local iDeal system. Germany and Belgium use Sofort, and for Poland there a few parallel systems. France and I guess Spain CCs are used.

Its varied.

In my experience, French bank cards are debit cards not credit ones.

Ah, then there to whole Maestro/VPay vs MasterCard/Visa thing. With CC I mean the latter, but its true they provide debit versions of those. My French bank provide a proper credit-CC though.

In 2019 according to the Dutch Central Bank [0] 1/3 of payments is done in cash amounting for 21% of the volume. And 88% carry cash.

    2019                transactions    value
                 cash       32%          21%
          pin (iDeal)       24%          44%
  contactless (iDeal)       43%          33%
           creditcard      0.6%           2%


    ownership                   2017    2018    2019
                    pocketcash   90%     88%     88%
      debitcard w. contactless   73%     83%     86%
              debitcard w. pin   33%     23%     18%
  contactless debit smartphone    7%      9%     12%
          app for p2p payments   17%     23%     31%
                    creditcard   43%     44%     44%

Maximum contactless in 2019 was €25, above €25 pin required. After covid-19 this was raised to €50. All debitcards allow pin transactions. These numbers come from the pfd at [0].

[0] https://www.dnb.nl/nieuws/nieuwsoverzicht-en-archief/dnbulle... on April 20, 2020

Don’t expect to be able to pay anything with a credit card in The Netherlands. It’s all maestro debit cards.

In the article the man mentioned he always refused to pay, so the payment is probably done at delivery. In Europe this is quite common.

At some places, you can just order them w/o creditcard data and pay with cash when they're at your door.

A person using this to harass someone will certainly not use their own money to do it.

Right, I forgot, that it is still common here in Germany, where I live :). But if these orders come from one person, the orders should be traceable. Also, I don't get why the pizza shops don't have a larger incentive to not fall victim to this.

So here in Germany they will often call you back on a land-line to confirm the order (and to have a verified phone number associated with the order) pretty sure that's keeping fraud down.

Susequent orders don't require this anymore because they have the address on file.

> I cannot understand why the police isn't looking into it

What crime is being committed?

Because the police don't give a shit about you or me or this guy.

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