Comment by 3np | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3np | Hacker News Reader

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My country of nationality, residence, and issuing bank are all different. On top of that, my name is odd for my place of residence and contains characters outside of A-Z (which makes names not match 100% on cards)

I get hit hard by anti-fraud systems.

If I budget 1-2h for any given online purchase, I have <50% success rate with Paypal and ~75% with Stripe. If I contact the bank and merchant, the issue is always with the payment processor. Trying to resolve through the payment processor goes nowhere. The only thing that can work is try again with another of my 6 legit cards (mix of visa/Mac debit/credit) and if I’m lucky it goes through. Sometimes the next day; I guess some cool down is in place.

This feels like discrimination or xenophobia with extra steps. If you’re international enough and have some bad luck, the systems will perceive you just like a scammer and will deny you service or require hours of intervention because of things like your name, location history, and nationality. (For those who haven’t noticed, sometimes PayPal will arbitrarily require you to create an account in order to complete a single payment. Nationality is required information in this step)

If it’s not something I really want provided only by a single seller, I will nowadays abort at merchants only accepting PayPal, and at the first failure of Stripe. It’s not worth the headache.

This reminds me... what about those who do not have a surname?

> Most Afghans have no surname; it is also common to have no surname in Bhutan, Indonesia, Myanmar, and the south of India.

They cannot handle patronyms, and for many people every local document (except passport and tax card) uses initials, for example. The problem is that the bank account name has initials (in many places for many people) which does not match your name.

My friend had an issue with Wise because they wanted the name to match that is on the passport, which was fine because it did. Then it started demanding that it matches his bank account name, which it cannot, because he has only initials there.

They are dealing with international customers. They need to understand these differences, but they do not.

I knew a guy with a single-character first name. He once bought an airline ticket but then got stuck at TSA who would not let him pass, despite all his ID etc saying the same thing.

A large number of web sites would not let him register at all.

This definitely needs more recognition. Same with time & date. Actually, same with all "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About <X>".

Here is a list: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

Awesome link, thank you. Reminds me of that article the other day about February 30th.

>> Most Afghans have no surname; it is also common to have no surname in Bhutan, Indonesia, Myanmar, and the south of India.

Oh this is completely new to me. So they have single name?

I wish there is a documented difference in all of these so that International companies can all pay attention.

> I wish there is a documented difference in all of these so that International companies can all pay attention.

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

Also, why do you limit to “International” companies? Don’t people from all cultures live in most every country, even in small numbers?

Yes, but you also have to be careful about many people having initials only for their bank account name, such as my friend who is in South India.

Yeah, I can only imagine how bad it would be to have an Arab name and only one of them.

Give privacy.com a try my friend and use whatever name you like. You put in your debit card for funds and generate credit cards per merchant.

I never buy anything with my real name anymore.

https://privacy.com/join/L6N28

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