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Comment by mooism2 | Hacker News Reader

If HN incorrectly hellbans someone... they piss someone off.

If a retailer incorrectly hellbans a customer, that is, they tell the customer that their card will be charged, and that the goods they ordered will arrive in the post, but without the intention of doing either of those things, owing to a genuine mistaken belief that the customer is engaging in credit card fraud, but lying nonetheless... are they leaving themselves open to legal action from the customer? From regulators? I'd expect the bad PR alone to be a worse hit for a retailer than a bulletin board.

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Absolutely spot on. Hellbanning a real user would probably be worse than not catching fraud in the first place, so must be avoided with utmost care.

- Hellbans are made via operator decision

- Hellbans are reversible and all customer support channels still work for a hellbanned user

This is my takeaway as well.

Also, why not just return "all charges as invalid" if the user has been Hellbanned?

What use is there to continue the charade, by in effect, providing false-positives to someone that will then go and act on that information and commit larger fraud? (by charging larger amounts with the stolen card).

I understand the sentiment -- just a little fuzzy on the execution IMO.

>commit larger fraud

If you are careful only give them FALSE positives (for good cards, decline), then when they ATTEMPT to commit larger fraud with the bad card they will be stopped.

This was my worry.

I've had experiences on a few sites (notably, RyanAir always seems to have problems) where I may try 3-4 cards, sometimes multiple times, before the transaction goes through.

Note that I have a few US credit cards, plus bank accounts in several countries & currencies... they're all in my name, but I wouldn't be amazed if I triggered some company's automated fraud triggers simply because of that.

If they hellbanned my purchases, I'd be seriously pissed... though I totally understand the OPs reasons.

I think as long as this has human review I'm in favor -- but if not, that's risking being seriously cruel to a legit user who simply has a non-normal interaction for unpredictable reasons.

I would be concerned about this as well; they'd better be damn confident that the people they hellban are actually scammers.

We're talking about micro-transactions - less than five dollars. If failing to charge for and ship small items at very small prices were legally actionable or subject to regulation, I imagine a whole slew of companies would be out of business.

And - if we were talking about $500 speaker sets or something, we would be talking about bad PR. But if a false positive fails to receive a $2 item, well, I imagine that would have to be a lot of false positives to lead to a net effect of bad PR.

Can you outline the law a company or individual would be breaking if you pretended to sell something to someone and didn't charge them for it without giving a solid reason?

Given you didn't save their credit card, issue a receipt stating payment was received in cash, or accused them of a crime what exactly is the crime being committed here?

Perhaps more hoax than fraud?

Can you outline the law a company or individual would be breaking if you pretended to sell something to someone and didn't charge them for it without giving a solid reason?

Probably section 17200 and 17500 of the California code. If you create the impression that a transaction has taken place, without actually performing one, that is fraud.

IANAL but breach of contract. You have made an offer through your website, the customer has accepted that order through your website, at which point by default a contract exists between you. You can wiggle round it a bit with your T+Cs, but if you are giving them every impression that a contract exists which you can fulfil then they are allowed to rely on a contract existing. If you've made no attempt to charge their card, that's your fault, not something you can blame on the customer.

If there were too many false positives I would also expect to attract attention from Trading Standards --- false advertising? --- and they might be satisfied that you're making honest mistakes, or they might insist that you overhaul your fraud detection procedures or your customer communications, but either way they will suck up some of your time.

(This is from a UK perspective.)

I disagree, if I order something from a site and it says it'll ship and I don't get it, I would probably call, which would probably get everything fixed.

Since my card would never have been charged I don't think there's any fraud or legal actions that could occur.

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