Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmount | Hacker News Reader

Down vote me on this, but here is my honest opinion (that may actually help others) phrased as a question.

Why would you as a hobby run a payment site linking credit cards and checking accounts when you appear to not have done any research in to how important loss prevention is in such an activity? If you were not interested why did you start? If you were interested how could you not know what steps to take?

View on HN

Hi, John. I'm not the poster, but the way I look at it, everybody has to learn caution sometime. If this guy's lesson costs him just $2k and a little headache, I'd say he got away cheap.

I can think of a number of important business lessons I learned that cost me more time or money. E.g., "be careful picking business partners", "don't start work without a signed contract", or "crazy clients don't get saner". All things I should have known, or could have discovered reading. But had I waited until I had read and appreciated all business lessons, I never would have started anything.

And I appreciate him sharing the lesson with Hacker News. It reminds me of the Despair, Inc poster on mistakes:

http://www.despair.com/mistakes.html

"It could be the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others."

So thanks, eam, for getting a bunch of young entrepreneurs to say, "Hey, maybe I should double-check our fraud prevention."

Always good to hear good calm advice from somebody I know and respect, Will. I admit I make tons of mistakes (and also would never start anything if I always "thought it through"). But I still really don't like what the original poster presented.

Hi OP here, thank you for your opinions. I just wanted to say that I thought that I had "thought it through" but apparently I didn't, it was more complicated than I thought it was. This is not the first time in my life that I thought I had thought something through, there have been numerous times actually in all aspects of my life. A year or so ago, I watched a Malcolm Gladwell talk on TED (http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce) where spaghetti sauce companies thought they had thought things through, but really didn't it. Of course I could have spend lots of time reading books, but even then I might have missed this. I just wanted to share my experience and ask for any advice (not legal) just advice/tips in general from others who had been in the same boat. So far the comments have been excellent and invaluable. They have taught me many things I didn't think of before, but more importantly it will help others who might be looking or are doing that same thing I was doing already on my side project.

Hey William, you're on point. This has definitely taught me a bitter lesson. I hope others who are working on similar projects learn from my mistake. As I mention before, today payment processing API's make it so easy to launch a ecommerce service that we forget about other factors. That's pretty much what happened to me.

This. Plus, you could very easily be charged for setting up a money laundering scheme. At the very least you shouldn't allow anyone to wire money directly to personal bank accounts. If you see the precautions companies like Western Union take you'll understand there are serious implications involved.

My exact reaction. It just seems mind-boggling that anyone would set something up like this as a side project. I'm not even sure it would be legal in the U.S. One thing I am not at all confused about: I would shut it down right now. Literally. Go shut it down.

Just to clarify, I've worked in this business. You can set something up and test it in sandbox mode with every payment processor I've worked with. That's the proper approach for a "side project." What blows my mind is having this set up and accessible to the public. It's just amazingly naive. I don't mean to beat up on you, OP, but you really should shut this thing down. Systems like this are monitored 24x7 for fraudulent activity. You're not really prepared to be in this business yet.

No, you're entirely correct... I completely underestimated the prevention loss factor. Being a side project, I really didn't dedicate 24x7 monitoring, only late at night and early mornings, so this has been an important lesson to me. I have actually already shut it down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com