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Comment by iakh | Hacker News Reader

It seems worse than that. Now there will be 2 layers of possible false positives - your card and your merchant's payment processor. I can understand a merchant opting in to a sift science like service, but having it built into the processor seems like a bad idea.

Stripe has no relationship with the end user, and should not. A legitimate buyer can't possibly be expected to call into Stripe to verify a transaction before or after a purchase attempt like they could to their own credit card or bank.

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(I work at Stripe) Buyers won't have to contact Stripe directly, just as they would not contact a third-party fraud detection service directly. They'll contact businesses, who can use the dashboard or API to mark the charge as safe and retry it without Stripe intervening. In our experience, card networks don't catch much fraud, and not all businesses have the time or resources to integrate a third-party solution—we don’t want them to be unprotected.

And, to be clear, the fact that Stripe is doing fraud protection isn't new—we've always blocked some fraudulent payments, as does every other major payment company. What we're launching is a much better system and, especially, one that businesses using Stripe can train so that there are fewer false positives over time.

Sure they can. A low false positive rate is almost a given. Low false positive rates are acceptable everywhere else, even in medicine, and when the "cost" is a minor inconvenience for perhaps millions in time/energy saved, its an acceptable business choice, even for me as a consumer.

(You note that Stripe has no business with the consumer. Well, then, this doesn't affect your relationship with Stripe, because there is none. It affects your relationship with your card's fraud prevention, which has and will always be there...)

I don't mind the false positive. It's just that people should be compensated for it, especially if the rate is low. It's just good business sense. If the bank can eat up actual fraud charges, why should it not eat false positives?

It would probably be abused all the time and the claims would be for larger amounts than the difference between two similar plane tickets. There would be people claiming they had to buy a car for $2,000 more just because they missed some kind of window where the price was cheaper (even though that doesn't make sense). I don't think any bank would open themselves up to that kind of liability. Even if they would, I think they'd cap it to a low amount that was close to the cost of eating chargebacks.

It was an actual charge for a specific route (e.g. SFO - JFK). I couldn't later claim that it was for SFO - YYZ.

For online transactions, least in my business, it's not the banks that eat the fraud charges it's the business. If someone uses your card to purchases services, and then later there is a charge back due to you reporting fraud, my business would lose the money that was paid from the card and would be fined $25 dollars. So for example say someone signed up for a VoIP service, made a bunch of calls through that service that were charged. You later check your credit card, see some fraudulent charges and then do a charge back. Well the bank/credit card company gets the money from the VoIP service and fines them.

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