Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile want to access your bank account
wsj.com
wsj.com
Anyone debug this?
Getting infinite CAPTCHA on .is and .today.
*EDIT Noticed this yesterday, probably going on for more than that. Makes me wonder if this is the twilight of the project. From what I heard in internet rumor that was always kind of the expectation from the person running the thing.
I did a look around to see if there are any services that duplicate the functionality but I didn't find anything terribly compelling.
And to think IPv6 has been around 20 years now....
It worked for me up until I changed my ISP. Captchas usually use the IP address to determine how difficult to make the challenge. Abusive ip ranges get worse experiences than others.
All I have to base that on is when I click on the checkbox sometimes no images load and it checks and then unchecks. Sometimes I seem to get the "hard set" though I think I missed part of the boat or something. I've been able to run through enough fails that I'd expect to get the hard set but don't. Which makes me think it isn't actually working right...
I'm calling the "hard set" those images they give you that are super extra grainy.
I'm almost curious enough to see what I can divine from inspecting their network requests but I have a hunch they have a vested interest in making that annoying.
Or maybe there are way more CAPTCHAs to click through than I'm thinking. To anyone: What is the highest number of CAPTCHAs you've clicked through and actually got a site, any site, to load at the end? I'm legit curious at this point.
So I'm thinking messed up cookies or extensions and IP reputation stuff are probably the root of this.
Edit:
cookies or extensions based on testing with chrome normal vs incognito on the same host
IP reputation based on testing with VPN using the same browser
That IP you're using is being shared with bots and other malware to attack sites. So instead of trying to filter out all the potential attacks through things like fail2ban, etc. what archive.is is doing is to just block entire ip address ranges.
It makes me yearn even more for IPv6 now.
From what I can tell though I'm able to get to a webserver running on my local machine and hosted off my public IP through a paid VPN. That indicates to me I am not behind CGNAT from what I understood of the wikipedia.
I probably missed something : )
2023:'public-dns'
However, changing your DNS is the answer to the problem.
Greed? Using the fees to fund ever more enticing rewards programs to attract customers?
The sky high rates in the US is because fuck you, deal with it. It's pretty explicitly wealth transfer from poor people to credit card companies, with a small kickback to well off credit card users to make it popular and hard to regulate.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/how-supreme-court-ruling-kil...
Edit: This was just in 2020, and is true, doesn't matter if you don't like it. We'll all be paying higher taxes now forever for it. And the value of the currency will devalue to the point where it is easier to payback, because that's what inflation does.
Edit: my poor communication skills
Because it's actually available for $75.
Suppose they ran the same ad and didn't accept any of those other payment methods at all.
Plaid, who got sued for abusing their access to people’s bank info. Fuck that guy.
Someone might say, "that would make Plaid require a money transmitter license" or something similar. I would argue, why should Plaid not need a money transmitter license for literally handling bank account login information?
If a company offers you a service and that service is free, you are not the customer, you are the product.
Companies like Amzn, costco, HEB, and now cell carriers are all moving towards their own cards which allows them to greatly reduce the fees incurred. CC fees and corruption is one argument in favor of CBDC. (granted there are plenty of reasons against)
What they really want is to get your bank account number so they can charge you whatever they want and you have no way to dispute it.
1) Item not delivered / broken / service not what I ordered => dispute.
2) Shop hacked and 2 months later charges my credit card $20,000? The charge hits and I dispute it, but the money is not gone out of my account. Can you imagine them hitting my debit account?
Some countries, I gather that the consumer-protection authorities have a lot of teeth, and they're a viable way to escalate on a lot of bad behaviour (denying return of defective goods, or refusing to honour warranty).
In the US, I don't think this is as common-- you might be able to raise an issue with your state Attorney General, and in 2029 he'll get to it-- so the magic word is "chargeback" to get a response.
If the above describes the prepaid debit card you are referring to, putting myself in eg Google's shoes re your (heavily paraphrased) question:
> why don't certain "global" companies like Google not accept payment for some of their services via prepaid debit?
I'm in business providing a long-term open ended service (cell, ISP, household utility). I want to ensure ongoing receipt of monthly payments for the service I am delivering with minimum hassle to myself and my customer. If I accepted autopay from a prepaid debit card (as I define it above), the card is certain to "run dry" at some point, guaranteeing a need for future intervention in the payment setup, and (unless the consumer is closely monitoring the prepaid card's balance as the months pass, which is unlikely) likely an interruption in the stream of monthly payments, with an associated likelihood of me interrupting service to the customer due to lack of payment (all costing me administrative overhead), resulting in me possibly losing the customer's business for good.
With autopay tied to a bank account, the primary payment risk is insufficient account balance; with autopay tied to a credit card, the risk of insufficient balance is nearly nonexistent; in general, the risk of interruption of payments from these two payment sources is low (vs nearly certain with a prepaid debit card).
Fednow hasn't exactly caught like wildfire like Pix or the india thing whose name I forgot, but it only has to do it once and it can still happen. I think once Walmart and Kroger start to push harder on it and the Request for Payment feature is avaialble, we will see big adoption.
Personally, moving money between Wise and Chase bank instantly was magic the first time it happened. Finally felt like I lived in a developed country.
What is the benefit to the consumer of using FedNow instead of a credit card when paying for a purchase? Is the merchant planning to add a credit card surcharge, thus the sole "consumer benefit" is avoiding this surcharge?
Some people will have to pay more to keep using credit cards (whether for float, purchase insurance, or convenience), simple as that.
should be
credit cards are points-based. Many / most credit holders don't care about revolving credit, but they do care about rewards points. This may be US-only.
FedNow was only just released, it is going to take time to add support. My bank doesn't support it yet.
I'd recommend them to everyone, but they've been sold to T-Mobile and I'm skeptical it won't be broken soon enough.
But for $180 a year I was getting 5GB data, unlimited voice+text. I also spent about $20 a year on roaming extras when I'd go to Canada for a couple weeks.
GoogleFi was probably my best experience when on android, but they didn't support iOS and their fee was notably higher than mint too. ($65 a month iirc?). GoogleFi was unlimited, better coverage, unlimited usage in Canada (my main roaming on home sim card) , and includes a bunch of extras like storage, youtube etc.
And can use as much of it for tethering as you want. Do the big carriers still limit that? I remember it used to be an add-on.
FWIW I paid $20/mo for 15gb for 1 year with Mint. Over 2/3rds less than TMobile (While using the same network).
If mint ends up not working out, Verizon prepaid has the same 15gb deal but for $35/mo with auto pay.
So far I have not noticed any difference when switching from T Mobile to Mint besides having to reconfigure IMessage due to the new eSim. EZ Mode.
Ended up going with Ting and it's been fine. Service is trash sometimes/doesn't work at all occasionally but I also don't want to live a life where I need my phone 24/7 so the dirt cheap pricing is attractive enough for me to stay.
Why?
Privacy's is especially good imo as you can set spending limits and easily (un)pause cards and create new ones pretty easily. Even outside of trying to take advantage of auto-pay discounts, it's just a nice piece of mind to be able to be a hard check on an accounting "Oopsie", mine or theres.
That said, not a fan of this overreach and general disregard for people's money. Yes, most people are terrible at managing their money, but hidden fees, auto pay not auto happening on the scheduled date, and general corporate greed, disrespect and distrust certainly doesn't help either.
Fo they have any security protections that prevent them from draining my accounts (either accidentally or via hacker)?
(1) I used to use Google Fi. There's simply no option to receive a paper bill or to pay via check.
Sounds like business need to stop trying to take advantage of the poor then.
For those whose mobile providers will switch to only using bank account numbers for payments and want the ability to be able to block access to the account if that account number is somehow compromised, I would recommend looking into Qube Money [1]. Among many other awesome functions (like being a great budgeting tool), it allows you to create different “Qubes” (pronounced “cubes”, think digital cash envelope) that you place money in and allocate towards different bills. It’s similar to Privacy and Capital One’s virtual credit cards in that each Qube is assigned a unique debit card number. More importantly, each Qube gets its own bank account number. Closing a Qube and opening a new Qube with a new bank account number is easy. There are more great features, but I figure this was most relevant to the topic.
“Similar to the Space Shuttle, my office has chairs.”
Which is exactly why ACH is the cheapest/most discounted method.
Help me understand, you have one checking account for one recurrent bill and then manually make sure that checking account has enough balance to cover that one recurring bill every month? That way nobody can drain your main funds, right? But what if there’s a big charge then you would be overdrafted?
I also saw qube recommended here on another thread as a simple way to make and close accounts easily (I think that’s the idea).
Unrelated, I like the extra protection credit cards give and the extra warranty and theft clauses. Hope visa and MC can get their act together.
Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile want you to connect a bank account to further tie an identity to a phone number / account.
This comes at request of the government. They do not want anonymous cellular users.
I'll never pay direct from my accounts because these companies will 'accidentally' drain an account and put people in an awful position, whereas a credit card company will happily tell a company like Verizon to eff off.
It's all good, these rent-seeking griftcos are making it easier and easier to fire them by the day.
One monthly price, including taxes. You can also find a $10/mo discount on their top tier plan online.
I haven't noticed any difference in service quality at all, nor would I expect much.
But, I'm sure that I'll somewhere at some point and not have great coverage. Par for the course. The only thing I can suggest is multiple providers if that is your case.
As for peak times, I haven't noticed anything bad there either. My guess is that while Visible is a MVNO, it is the main MVNO for Verizon. As I mentioned, I get the strong feeling they are Verizon v2, it wouldn't be in their best interest to provide too bad of service.
News came out today that MasterCard and Visa are upping their CC fees so the reasoning from the carriers makes sense. If anything it's good they're passing the saving on?
Not quite. The notice I got from T-mobile was that my bill would go up by $5 unless I handed over my bank account info for the direct charge.
That they aren't up-front on pricing is unfortunate (and somewhat unethical) but it seems the hidden lede here is how usurious the CC networks charges are.
It's really time we had a modern payment network in the US (like Europe, India, Brazil, etc etc) so we didn't have to pay the CC tax.
I kept my credit card autopay and paid the extra, because the credit card provides some semblance of actual consumer protection.
I really hope banks charge the carriers for bounced checks. That’s not something a consumer should have to do if their account is $3 too low because they funded the account for whatever the bill was last month.
If I ever go over my data cap in a month, I will be automatically upgraded to the next tier plan. Here's the catch: my current plan is grandfathered, and no longer available to switch back. Once I "accidentally" upgrade, I'll be stuck there.
No big deal, right? It's another $5/mo. Well, guess how much the AutoPay discount is?
Basically I only use text-based web pages while I'm out and about. No streaming audio or video or downloads. I suppose there's not a lot going on in the background polling, either. Of course I hop back on WiFi wherever possible, my ISP makes that easy.
I've been doing this routine for at least a year, and I have warnings set when I'm up around 480MiB. I've never gotten a cap warning, although I've had a few warnings that "Chrome has used more data than usual!"
I really have to stay on my toes with these carriers, my bill always creeps up over the years.
I found some code online [0] that runs every hour and purchases an additional GB if my remaining amount falls below a threshold. It’s been working great for us.
We dropped our bill for 2 lines from ~$100/mo to $21/mo.
[0] https://github.com/dbrand666/usmobile-lifeguard/tree/main
if you don't feel like your service is slow during the times you use your wireless, then there's no harm in using MVNOs.
If feels like a forceful marketing push, to trick customers into constantly escalating their idea of "normal usage" until they're streaming video 24/7.
To be clear, the minimum increment one can purchase is 1 GB.
We're in a bit of a weird situation where we aren't in the US the majority of the time, so most months we don't use any data off our US plan.
If we do end up in the US then that bit of code keeps buying us more data 1GB at a time as needed.
Another cool thing is that our USMobile eSIM uses the 4G data from our local eSIM so that we can still make/receive calls/SMS on our US line from anywhere. It treats the local 4G like WiFi Calling. Pretty dope.