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Comment by selcuka | Hacker News Reader

My account got marked as "high possibility of fraud", even though I validated my email and added a credit card they even charged. The error message said that I had to contact support@fly.io but that address only accepts email from paid subscriptions.

With no way to evaluate the service, I opted to delete my account.

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Exactly what happened to me as well. In my case, I was (fortunately?) messaged by someone from Fly.io after asking around the community forum how to remedy the issue. I think the person I talked to was inferring that the system got tripped because I was using my own domain for my email address.

It's since been corrected, and I still have a handful of services running with them, but getting started with the platform definitely was a rougher experience than I was expecting it to be.

So they will regard any large company using their service as fraud? Insane

Large company? Literally every company I ever worked for, the smallest one were 5 people, had their own domain for emails. And they were not all in IT.

So we agree its insane to cut off every company with a domain? Good.

That would be insane, yes. It isn’t the case, though. I signed up with my own domain just fine.

I don't know what merchant system they are using but I will say it is very common for them to have their own anti fraud detection and rejection on charges. Your specific case could be related to a huge list of possibilities (even many of them a rollup of many other interactions on other sites that happen to use the same merchant or foundational fraud data).

Thinking this is just because of a domain name is silly.

Also Fly.io -- You may want to clearly accept and manage trial issues (or at least a subset) via a support path. It seems silly to effectively bounce users with the impression that you have no support because they are not YET paying customers while in the trial phase.

as a counter-point, i use custom domain for email, and haven't had a problem with fly.

It may not be custom domain but rather self-hosted mail server.

That's worse. A self-hosted mail server implies a significant cost investment that probably wouldn't be required for ye olde hotmail account.

No, we don't flag accounts as high risk based on email domain.

We don't charge credit cards to try and remove the fraud flag. We do a preauth, which is immediately canceled. Sometimes this looks like a charge.

> We do a preauth

Probably that was it, but my point is, there is no process you (as a customer) can follow to remove the fraud flag.

Also the flag was still there long after the preauth.

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