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Comment by 0xy | Hacker News Reader

You hit a flag for suspicious behavior and they can't tell you exactly what was suspicious because this allows fraudsters and criminal networks to adjust their operations accordingly.

People don't just get terminated for no reason.

Either you were doing something sketchy or you were acting in a behavior that is similar to previous fraud/criminal behavior.

I'm a legitimate customer and my credit card has been flagged for fraud numerous times at large companies (Steam, PayPal, eBay etc). Often temporarily, however.

(source: have worked in various fraud/risk departments)

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Imagine if we were writing our laws like this, or court rulings would go like this.

“We can’t tell you what evidence we used to convict you because that would mean criminals can adjust their operations accordingly”

And then you hear someone say “people don’t get convicted for no reason”

I have no idea if the OP did or did not act fraudulently and I’m aware that we are talking about a private and not a government entity here.

I bought an item online. It was shipped, but never delivered to me and FedEx returned it to the merchant. The merchant does not reply to any communications. I had already asked Square for a refund before the package shipped (as it shipped 6 weeks late). It took Square three months to even respond to my chargeback request. They asked for copies of all communications and the shipping logs. I gave them everything. They said they could not do a chargeback since the package shows as "delivered" and their script does not allow them to deviate from this. We went back and forth because I thought they were confused about me receiving the package. They confirmed they were not confused and that they fully understood that the package had been delivered back to the merchant and was never delivered to me, but it was still technically "delivered" so it is not possible for them to do a chargeback.

After that all their support would tell me is that I need to call FedEx and trick them into changing the status on the package to "undelivered" and they would happily do a chargeback for me.

Once we had gone back and forth on this a few times they said they had decided it was better to just terminate my account.

I hear this argument all the time. What I never hear is anything that actually helps to judge the trade-off. How often is a flag incorrect? How often is a legitimate user able to recover from the flag and how much effort does it take? I notice you say your flags have only been often temporary, i.e. sometimes permanent.

Are we really ok with throwing away due process because it might help the criminals? Sure nobody needs that game but access to money services is a bit different. And what you also never hear about is being refunded for all the content paid for in the blocked account.

The justice system has thousands of false positives and throws innocent people in jail for decades sometimes. As a whole, society accepts some level of error margin in every facet of society.

After working in risk and fraud, I've seen some truly horrifying stuff. An elderly woman threatened physically if she didn't let the attacker drain her bank account. Huge scams for thousands of dollars. Organized crime rings fleecing millions of dollars. Identity theft. On and on.

I would wager that society would accept some level of errors in exchange for drastically reduced criminal activity that actually hurts people.

Legitimate people getting blocked inadvertently are rare, and often of the stories you hear on HN and Reddit and other places, a good portion of these "innocent victims" are actually doing sketchy stuff when you dig into it.

Justice isn't and cannot be an exact science. Society agrees and accepts the risk.

I'm not asking for exact numbers. But let's have some numbers, because otherwise how can we agree to something when we don't know what we're agreeing to?

According to some studies, up to 1% of prisoners in the U.S. are innocent. That would mean 23,000 people wrongfully imprisoned.

In my experience, false positives in fraud and risk models are lower than 1%.

They should at least tell you that a flag for fraudulent activity has been raised. At the same time I'd like for there to be some way to have an external auditor validate that it's not due to some bug or overzealous filter.

With GDPR such automated decision making can be stopped, and entities fined if not. Unless there's a big ol' exception for anything that falls under banking security & fraud.

Can't do that. "Tipping off" is a crime.

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