Fisker lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments for months | Hacker News Reader

Fisker lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments for months

techcrunch.com

83 pointsmfiguiere70 comments

Billing and Accounts Payable will always seem like a "how could you mess that up?" problem to engineers, but it literally is difficult and complicated and rife with ways to very seriously and permanently fuck your relationship with your customer. And potentially with your auditors, investors, and whoever performs legal oversight in your jurisdiction. All of the largest companies in the tech world have been hit by AP fraud. Billing, collecting taxes, etc. is just fundamentally complicated (fundamentally = by laws of the lands.) There's a reason Stripe is a bazillion dollar business!

That said, this screams of amateur hour. If Fisker can't keep track of the money I certainly wouldn't trust them to build a car correctly.

EDIT: I didn't realize they were already a public company. How in the fuck did they pull that off? It's so over for them.

Fisker became a public company through a SPAC, which allows them to conveniently sidestep a lot of procedures than an IPO would entail.

Ahhhhhh of course. Thanks, that makes sense.

> Billing and Accounts Payable will always seem like a "how could you mess that up?" problem to engineers, but it literally is difficult and complicated and rife with ways to very seriously and permanently fuck your relationship with your customer

Yep.

Over the years I've seen some pretty crazy payment related errors that you can't think is possible, like a 12+ year old publicly traded company who generates $60 million dollars a year and their business model is a platform that lets other people sell products, in other words their customers have their own customers and buying things with money through a hosted checkout page is a focal point of their business.

One bug was during this checkout flow:

    - Open checkout page for product A and see a buy price of $99
    - Open a new tab and visit product B's checkout page and see a buy price of $199
    - Switch back to the first tab and buy product A for $99
    - You get charged $199 and credited for purchasing product B

I was only the end user of such a system so I don't know what their code looked like but I'm guessing their checkout page had stuff stored in a session and the last page loaded new data in the session but it didn't match what was shown on the checkout page. That's a massive assumption but that's how I imagine it happened.

Why wouldn't you do the reverse bug on the checkout flow? You'd at least gain

No, as described at least, you'd always get the product you paid for. Just not necessarily the one you wanted.

Believe it or not, I have seen the same problem on an insurance website for a very large insurance company. The issue was that the developers were storing the rates in session variables and so when you open a new product in a separate tab with a different rate, it would overwrite the session variables with the rates for the newly opened product.

Then when the user went to the previous tab to purchase the product they ended up buying it at the rate for the product opened in the new tab.

It is amazing that this mistake wasn't caught for a long, long time.

I hope they didn’t store the literal rate, but only the selected product id, in the session. Otherwise, you could just modify your request and set a low rate…

Nope. They stored a WHOLE RANGE of fields which was also used to display the rates directly to the customers. A total mess!

Yeah, I had this problem with the world's only ultra-low-cost airline.

We were working on an analytics system and this sortof stuff was pervasive. The entire frontend basically didn't handle multiple tabs.

Mind you, this was in 2012, I assume they've fixed it by now.

I feel like the concept that keeping track of numbers, particularly with distributed sources and sinks, is hard would actually be very intuitive to engineers.

For things to get this far is a failure of accounting. Engineering may have set the stage, but it's accounting's job to respond appropriately rather than letting (or not seeing) this play out. Treating accounting unseriously is an extremely obvious, avoidable mistake that a mindboggling number of businesses make. A substantial portion of the finance and accounting industry thrives on cleaning up the outcome of accounting being pawned off on the owner's spouse / kid / niece / nephew. They'll figure it out, right? It's just math.

I was thinking, surely it can't be that stupid in this case, but then I checked. Who knows, maybe Geeta Gupta-Fisker really is a profoundly skilled financial wizard. The founder's / chairman's / CEO's spouse is always the wrong person to be managing finances for so very many reasons. At the very least the optics of undermining of a firewall between accounting and equity undermines trust in finance. Such a relationship inspires extra special attention from auditors and regulators when mistakes happen. It's a clear sign that leadership doesn't take accounting as seriously as they should. Yet nepotism keeps being a normal thing that happens often.

> Billing and Accounts Payable will always seem like a "how could you mess that up?" problem

After owning five businesses, I agree with this. When I do due diligence on a company before investing, I can usually tell if it is worth investing in by looking at their billing practices, billing reporting and AR aging and history. Good businesses are machines for trading money for whatever they sell. Billing is core functionality.

There is an old Saturday Night Live commercial skit for a fake financial services company, produced in the style of the old Charles Schwab ads. It seems like they could have used some advice from David Schwimmer:

We will make a list of our clients, and how much money each of them has given us to invest. We will keep this list in a safe place. If we have time, we will make a copy of the list, in case something happens to the first list.

We must take special care of the list with each client’s name and the amount of money he has invested. If we were to lose that list, we would be ruined.

If my wife calls while I’m in shagging my secretary, tell her I’m at a board meeting. That way I’ll be able to continue shagging my secretary without my wife knowing about it. If my wife were to find out about me and my secretary, that would be bad. As bad as losing the list.

https://snltranscripts.jt.org/95/95cgrayson1.phtml

https://snltranscripts.jt.org/95/95cgrayson2.phtml

They've also slashed prices https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-27/fisker-sl... . Presumably that's on existing inventory as the manufacturing is paused. So even if they do cash your check it won't be as big as it used to be.

It looks like bankruptcy is imminent. If they do go under does that mean there would be no one there to collect the telemetry? Would an electric car made by a bankrupt company be the first electric car not to constantly be spying on its owners?

Someone else could still do the spying.

More importantly, electric cars use a TLS protocol for charging, and that TLS protocol requires the manufacturers to issue new certificates every (90?) days.

If the servers go down, these cars won't be able to charge with DC chargers at all (which requires the TLS protocol), and maybe not with home chargers either (which sometimes uses the TLS protocol).

The 90 days limit is a Let's Encrypt limit. I don't think TLS limits that length in and of itself. Except that it might need to be finite. But I'm not sure that the `Not After` field is required.

For maybe 5 years or so, the maximum expiry time for a TLS cert (for anything under the purview of the Certification Authority Browser Forum) has been just under 400 days.

That's also not a hard technical limit in the TLS spec, you can easily generate a self signed cert that expires in the year 3000 if you want, but it's voluntarily abided by from all the Certificate Authorities that want to have their root certs included in almost every web browser. It's _possible_ that EV chargers don't use common Certificate Authorities, but it feels unlikely to me.

These aren't browsers, so that doesn't apply. Their authorities are completely separate. Check out "White Paper of Charging Interface Initiative e. V." from Charins website. https://www.charin.global/media/pages/technology/plug-charge...

Are you sure about this? I thought client certs were only for plug'n'charge (which identifies individual cars for the purpose of payment), and charging paid out of band could be negotiated using dumber protocols.

That is the funniest thing I have read today, thank you.

I understand the need for an encrypted connection, but it is worrying to see cars getting built more or less like phone or web apps, and encountering the same obtuse issues.

Fisker Trading Suspended by NYSE

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39821335

Could the accounting problems be due to intentionally delaying having accurate revenue numbers?

Or (looking at vehicles delivered without payment) sales dept. breaking rules?

Or (always a good guess) is it actually a software fiasco, and people trying to work around non-working software?

Or did they not have an adequate accounting organization set up when they started taking orders, and for some reason let that persist for months?

Yes, to every single one of your questions.

>In a few cases, it delivered vehicles without collecting any form of payment at all

That's crazy. I'm curious what happened in those instances. I suppose it depends a lot on the jurisdiction, but can Fisker come back and demand payment, or did those people just get free cars?

I was utterly confused until I realized this is not Fisk*a*r the scissor maker.

Fiskars

For something as valuable as a car, they definitely can. You still agreed to pay them.

However, you can decide to take the whole thing to court and see what a judge thinks about it. In a way, they screwed up and that may affect the contract.

They might have a case to keep the car!

There are laws around sending people packages and then demanding payment.

I think it was to stop trolls from mailing you garbage and demanding payment afterwards…

I’m not a lawyer, them having a purchase agreement in place probably changes things, but a clever lawyer might be able to make a case

How are they going to register without a title?

Unregistered car fines are probably less than the cost of the car in many use cases.

Those laws are for sending things unsolicited. In this case, the customer asked for the car and agreed to pay for it. The company failed to process the payment. Very different scenario.

> There are laws around sending people packages and then demanding payment.

Laws are different when you request the package. I don't believe Fisker sent cars to random people.

Ultimately it boils down to the purchase agreement. Usually the company still has a right to collect payment and in a legal setting, the company will still win because the purchase agreement holds the buyer accountable for payment unless there is a clause in there which dictates the terms of late payment.

They might have a case to keep the car!

There are laws around sending people packages and then demanding payment.

I think it was to stop trolls from mailing you garbage and demanding payment afterwards…

I’m not a lawyer, them having a purchase agreement in place probably changes things, but a clever lawyer might be able to make a case, but I’m just spitballing

“Checks were not cashed in a timely manner or just lost altogether” only in the US of A, or movies from 70s, something like this.

To be fair, my mother is in a protracted situation with one of Europe's largest banks and the UK government's savings scheme. She made a transfer of a sum of money to the savings scheme but the bank refused for various reasons, yet the savings scheme acted as if they had received it. She now has the lump sum in both the bank account and the savings scheme with both of them claiming everything is fine and refusing to investigate further unless she files an official complaint at having 2x the money(!)

If a global bank and the UK government can't figure this stuff out, I can certainly see how a company like Fisker might drop the ball.

OP was commenting on the use of cheques, which is comical in the rest of the world. Banking errors can happen anywhere.

Yep. I remember having a chequebook. Pretty sure it was around the mid 1990s. I don't remember ever using one, or ever renewing the chequebook. I don't think I've seen an actual paper cheque since the job I quit in 1998.

(I'm from Australia.)

Guess she should close the savings account and see how much they send her?

"Bank error in your favor. Collect $200."

An extremely accurate way to describe it. $200 back when Monopoly was made is equivalent to ~$4500 USD.

Heh. Couple months ago my mortgage company applied a payment to two consecutive months, also paid by paper check. Maybe check processing skills are getting lost from the workforce.

I am now trying to set up direct deposit in an investment account I own. Despite being able to buy and sell online in that account, to enable direct deposit I need to mail them a paper form, with notarized signature, and include a voided blank check. I have not written a paper check in years and I'm not even sure I have any.

Most banks will print a sheet of 3 on demand at a branch. I think they're called counter checks? I haven't used a checkbook in probably about a decade, so when they've been needed for some reason, I just get those.

Truly. I had no idea anyone was still using cheques in 2024. Why weren't they simply doing bank transfers? I don't know if you even could buy a car with a cheque in Australia.

In fact we're ending the cheque system entirely in the next few years. I'm 34 and have never written a cheque, and only received about 4 - none of which were in the last 5 years.

You can get a Bank Cheque!

I've purchased a car privately this way.

Although, very sensibly, the seller met us at his bank and paid the Cheque in to his account whilst we were there. Fake Bank Cheques are a thing.

I havent used a Cheque Book since the late 1990s. We used to order take-away food in London and then pay with a Cheque and Cheque Guarantee Card when the driver got to the door!

Which of course meant you could buy food on a Friday if you had no money and didnt get paid until Monday! LOL :-)

The original BNPL Scheme! ;-)

But yes, I dont think they issue Cheque Books here in AU anymore. And if they did, what would you even do with one!

Can you imagine trying to pay in a shop with one!

> You can get a Bank Cheque!

> I've purchased a car privately this way.

I've done that, for a motorcycle. It was in 1999. I've bought a dozen or so vehicles since, all paid either in cash (for inexpensive ones) or bank transfer (anything over about $10,000). I'm also in AU.

To shed some light on why Americans kept checks for so long: I'm 33 and have never done a bank transfer. I can't even say what the flaws in our system are, because I grew up in a family where it was never considered as an option: money was sent as cash or checks only.

I moved Finland 30 years ago. Checks for private customers did no longer exist at that time. (Checks for businesses reportedly still existed a couple of years.)

Since the pandemic started I have not carried a wallet (paying cash was seen as some kind anti-social behavior with high risk to infect someone) There are zero places where I would need cash. An increasing number of places does not accept cash.

For some ten years we have had international account numbers (IBAN). Transfers inside the Euro zone cost nothing (included in every basic account package) and take one banking day.

Nowadays there are several transfer apps where the transfer takes seconds or less. I am not using those because I run a Google-free Android and have root on my phone.

I have some extra good news for you: https://www.brusselstimes.com/916540/10-second-transactions-...

Moving money using IBAN and home banking is genuinely insanely easy at this point inside the EU

An American mind cannot comprehend what you just said.

It is very convenient to send money online, but through banks it is expensive and if you use payment systems, study the question very carefully. i once got to a service that said that the transfer is free, but in the end I was charged a crazy hidden commission, so i now do not experiment and work through Arbonum for 3 years already.

I'm 43, and I don't even know how to do a bank transfer. Sounds amazing. I don't like checks at all. If I don't mind paying a fee, I'll use one of the apps. But for moving money around, checks are all I know. I don't think I'm that unusual in the USA.

I'm in Australia. All the major and I'm pretty sure all or almost all of the minor banks and bank-like businesses (Building Societies and Credit Unions here) use a thing called PayID. I can send almost everybody I know money just by using their mobile phone number or email address, and the transfer happens from my account to theirs literally in seconds. I can also send money to anybody's BSB/Account Number, and that happens pretty much overnight. Writing a check feels like an archaic thing my parents used to do, like dialling a rotary telephone or sending a fax. I'm pretty sure if someone offered me payment by check, I'd turn it down assuming it's a scam. (I'm 56, for comparison)

BSB and account transfers are also largely instant. New and large transfers may take overnight.

Also, you missed an important part: zero fees.

It’s amazing how different the customs can be.

I’ve only received a check once in my life, in 2004 from a US company. I could not cash it with my regular (online) bank in Poland. I had to open a foreign currency account with the national bank, just for this check, and go to their special customer service department in person, at their HQ. It was like bringing them an alien artifact.

Hah. Once I had to get a wire transfer from a foreign company for some consulting work. I had to open up a new bank account just for that. It's like a mirror image.

use Arbonum, it does not take any hidden commissions, but immediately shows how much the commission will be. Usually from 3%.

It's also fast, easy to understand and the technical support works 24/7

I'm an American. A business I own pays for utilities (internet, gas, water, electric, garbage, sewer), workers comp, credit card bills, service people (electrician, carpenter, accountant), income taxes, and insurance by check. At home I also pay my personal utilities, credit card, service people, some medical, income taxes, and insurance by check. In-person over-the-counter purchases are paid by credit card.

> Truly. I had no idea anyone was still using cheques in 2024.

Pretty much nobody uses cheques anymore.

However, checks are alive and well.

I sometimes advise small and midsize businesses that are having financial problems. Most of them have this exact issue: accounts receivable are a mess. Often, it's because they try outsourcing it to their accountant, who means well but doesn't quite understand that trading money for services/products is the core function of most businesses. Often, instead of buying billing/POS software that fits the business, the accountant has everything being billed out of quick books, and no one but accounting has access to it.

* Sales can't price products accurately and quickly and eventually get frustrated with being stuck with quota pressure and no way to sell the product. Eventually, they start doing bad deals.

* Cash and payment handling is not disciplined. So think PCI nightmare and easily pilfered cash and checks.

* Eventually, the issue becomes, "Where did all the money go?"

This problem is usually really easy to fix as long as the financial problems haven't turned malignant.

Recent discussion about Fisker in the context of a popular negative review of their car (“the worst car I've ever reviewed”): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39650115

“Material Weakness” is audit-speak for royal f-up. As a public company I’m amazed they were able to make it through prior financial statements without proper controls. If their quality control related suits don’t take them down the investor ones sure could.

Rivian lost my full payment for an R1S.

What was the outcome? Free car? A strongly worded letter and you wrote another check?

Not a free car because I paid them.

Funny enough their dashboard showed a payment so I just screenshot that for them to look up in their own db!

That's astonishing. What ended up happening?

My neighbor has one. Beautiful car. Parts are unobtanium. It’s sat on his driveway for five years.

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