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Comment by returnofzyx | Hacker News Reader

Hetzner has a seriously flawed fraud detection system. There are multiple documented review complaints. Seriously, try opening an account from a third world / low income country (non EU/US/UK/CA/AU/NZ), your order will be flagged immediately. If they don't want orders from those countries, they should explicitly say so.

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Country of origin is not the sole reason we reject some orders. Most orders are rejected because of more than one red flag. We do have customers from "high-risk" countries. We also reject many European orders that appear to be fake, or that are far enough along the "possibly risky" scale. It is not a perfect art, but our team is constantly tinkering to improve our methods. We find that being overly cautious helps us to prevent abuse down the road. --Katie, Marketing Hetzner Online

Hetzner's definition of "high risk" orders is certainly geographically biased. If you're worried about invoice payments, consider a prepaid credits model.

On the other hand it probably allows them to offer these prices. For AWS, unpaid bills from fraudulent accounts will make up a significant line item, Hetzner can't afford that at their margins.

When we thought to rent a dedicated server for our hackerspace we initially put "Bernd Liefert" (a german in-joke) as the responsible admin down and they basically told us "lol no we know our jokes, too". We had to tell them a real, existing person as contact or they wouldn't have rented us the box.

So can confirm, they also reject European orders.

Had the same issue trying to open an IBM cloud account recently. After submitting my CC info the system told me to get in touch via email, and after contacting them they wanted two official documents (Driver’s License and Passport) to be submitted via email. Big nope from me.

Hetzner will actually refuse your order after you submit your documents with no valid reasons whatsoever. At a point, you just give up and ask your EU co-workers to spin up dedicated servers for you.

We do not publish the specific reasons why we reject orders. If we did this for every customer, it would be really easy to create a fake account. Potential abusers would quickly learn what to avoid. So we don't publish this information to anyone. We understand that that seems harsh. That's not what we intend. We just want to prevent abuse. --Katie

It's not ethical to withhold this information. I'm sorry it makes it harder for your fraud departments but it's not ok to reject someone and not tell them why.

That's all there is to it. I've had this happen to me by banks before and it's shit because the customer has no recourse. They can't advocate for themselves.

This practice needs to change, industry-wide.

We know it feels terrible to be rejected. We do. But every online store and service has customers who they reject. The internet can really test your trust in people, and for good reason. Our products are not flowers, or delivered food, or books or music, which are all pretty non-controversial. Even companies that sell these things online reject new customers. Our products, like a car and many other things, are mostly for good, but in the wrong hands, they can be destructive. There unfortunately aren't international licenses for trustworthy sysadmins or an international police agency that can enforce that. So we have to try to do our best using our own systems. People who abuse servers are not always easy to spot. There are, of course, customers who accidentally resemble a fake customer. In the past, we used to tell customers why we rejected their orders because of this. And we had much higher rates of abuse. So we changed our process, and we no longer publish this information. And this has been working better. It's harder for people to create fake accounts with us now. We don't mean to hurt anyone's feelings or cause frustration. --Katie

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