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Comment by jcr | Hacker News Reader

On two of the non-profits I've worked on, we had trouble with donation fraud. At the time, a few years ago, it was a huge problem. Donation fraud happened to a sizable percentage of non-profits and charity organizations, and it particularly harmed the small, all-volunteer groups which lacked the resources/skills to deal with it. Basically, criminals would target charities with bogus donations as a way to test their stolen credit cards. As you might imagine with all the charge-backs and uncertainty, this caused a lot of problems and headaches for the charities.

I'm sure you probably can't give much detail on your risk management and fraud detection measures, but has the donation fraud problem been more or less solved?

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I wonder about this. I work for a nonprofit and we lost a fair number of donations because of false positives for fraud. We ended up loosening the standard. As a nonprofit, we aren't sending out a product, so it seems like it makes more sense to err on the side of accepting donations and deal with chargebacks, if there are some, than to reject potential valid donations. However, we are bigger than the organizations you seem to be describing, so maybe it depends on the size of your organization.

Hey there - fraud is still an ongoing issue for many non-profits, and it's been one of the most well-received features in the product (an understated but important one!). With Tilt.com and our other enterprise tools, we've needed to build automated and manual systems along with third-party integrations to successfully fight fraud at scale.

The by-product of our current efforts is that we're able to include it into each product we release -- shoot me an email if you'd like to intro us to your contacts at those non-profits. james @ tilt is my email.

It's obvious, but fraud has definitely been an issue with all the simple Bitcoin donation buttons/GUIs that have popped up in the last year or so.

No it hasn't. Bitcoin is a push system of payment, creditcards are a pull system of payment. Bitcoin payments use cryptography on a non-proprietary ledger secured by proof of work of hundreds of millions of dollars of computing power (meaning once the payment is done, there is no central party to reverse it like say Paypal could reverse payments on their proprietary Paypal ledger, and unless you have a computer from the 22nd century, you won't be able to reverse the transaction).

In other words, it's an entirely different system of payments. No clue what type of fraud you're referring to, but the fraud explained in the post you replied to does not apply to bitcoin.

If due to lack of punctuation you mean something different, i.e. that CC fraud is so rampant that everyone is switching to bitcoin donations and that they've been popping up everywhere because of that, I doubt that that's been the key driving factor, although it surely is part of the equation.

In any case I don't really know what you meant to say :-/

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