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Comment by cabalos | Hacker News Reader

I think this is credit card company policy and not specifically Stripe. IIRC, there is some language regarding using your own credit card because it could potentially be used to give yourself a loan. Credit cards have a much higher APR and lower limits for a cash advance. Processing your own cards could be used as an avoidance.

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Last time I worked with (on?) a payment processor we got special credit cards that worked like Stripe's test numbers for testing production. I.e. some cards would go through, others would fail with errors specific to each card number.

They were probably one of the most closely guarded pieces of equipment we had since the cards that cleared did so at any merchant so it'd work at point of sale but the vendor would never receive the money.

I'm surprised the payment system is designed in such a way to make that possible

It's the way the credit system was designed, even before widespread computer networking - based entirely on trust. The customer would bring the card in and the merchant would make a signed carbon copy and call it in or deliver the receipts to the bank every day, which would settle the accounts between banks over a week or so, with the credit card provider carrying some level of liability. This is one of the reasons credit cards weren't accepted most places until networked POS terminals and instantaneous verification made the trust more practical.

Some merchants have their own verification steps in addition to the terminal like Best Buy checking a customer's ID to see if it matches the card and one of these special cards wouldn't fly if anyone actually looked it. It's not like you can walk into a Lamborghini dealership with one like you can with a Centurion card (which has some sort of concierge service for verifying large purchases IIRC).

Presumably, somewhere within the bowels of American Express, there's a test card for testing the Centurion large-payment verification process, where feeding it through a merchant and having them run a verification on it, will get them routed to a mock concierge on Amex's side (or rather, a human concierge diverted to follow a special mock workflow script.)

"Everytime you run your test suite, someone actually gets up for every test case, runs over to the copy machine, and creates physical carbon copies for DHS."

They should have mock Lamborghini dealerships and mock supercar test-drives so any developers debugging can be confident of all their changes.

It’s really easy to set this up. Authorizations for changes get routed to the bank of the issuer. It’s no different than rejecting for a bad a zip code, except it’s based purely off the card number.

This is anecdotal, so take it with a grain: I worked for a credit card processor about a decade ago, and it was routine to have the merchant run a penny transaction on the terminal, and refund it post testing to make sure it works.

They're fairly large processing over $40b in annual transaction volumes, and there wasn't any stress about not doing it again post testing (the only stress was the customer wanting a refund for the transaction costs).

If it is a merchant bank, or network requirement, it's either explicitly for card not present transactions, or not well followed. The important factor was handling of the credit card information (PCI DSS compliance).

It wouldn’t be their own Corp card, because it comes from a personal employee account and thus are separate entities. The $16 is also taxed by the irs

> could potentially be used to give yourself a loan

Noob question: Would using a debit card test the payment system without the self loan float?

I believe so, but it requires more infrastructure setup. You'll have to have a prod level test ACH account through Dwolla or something, then watch Stripe interact with that. It's not just as simple as switching card numbers, unless you just want to use your debit card or the company provided one.

How is this different from withdrawing from an ATM with my C/C ?

Different credit limit and loan terms.

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