This is a fairly long article but worth reading. Here is my take away:
1. The irreversible feature of Bitcoin should remain for many good reasons as amplified in this article.
2. It explained why most exchanges do not accept credit card or promote it, as in the case of Coinbase.
3. There are many good reasons why Credit and Debit Card companies should worry about their outdated payment network, credit card fraud, chargebacks, and the extremely high interest they are charging consumers and small business owners.
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How Credit Card Fraud Sank One Bitcoin Exchange
Danny Bradbury (@dannybradbury) | Published on January 13, 2015 at 13:19 GMT
COINDESK:
One of the biggest problems for bitcoin exchanges and their customers is often making the exchange quick and easy. Exchanges like Canadian firm Virtex made the decision a long time ago not to accept credit cards. Their biggest concern? Fraud, in the form of chargebacks.
In a credit card chargeback, a credit-card paying customer asks the issuing bank (the bank that gave them the card) to reverse a transaction made with a merchant. This can happen for a variety of legitimate reasons. A merchant may not have delivered the promised goods or service, or it may have been faulty. In some cases, a card may have been stolen and used without the owner’s consent.
Sometimes, however, the owner of the card perpetrates their own fraud, by trying to reverse a legitimate financial transaction. It’s effectively a pre-blockchain version of double spending. This can happen a lot on the Internet, where companies are dealing with large numbers of unknown customers half a world away.
Chargeback target
This happened to Joey Rich, who found himself at the wrong end of a steep learning curve in 2010.
Having purchased some coins, he began selling them at a profit. He lost his initial investment of $9,000, though, after his bitcoin exchange, BuyBitcoins.com, suffered a series of chargebacks from stolen credit cards.
He explained that a combination of lost credit card revenues and chargeback fees led to a loss of his funds.
Rich said: “For chargebacks, credit card companies charge fees of $25 to $35 in addition to the reversal of the original payment as a deterrent. So I also got hit with a huge number of those $35 fees, which is especially painful on orders of $5 to $10. As my my bank account went into the red, I started getting hit with overdraft fees as well, so it was quite a fiasco.”
Aside from the lost revenues, one of the nasty side effects of chargebacks is that credit card processors keep score. Too many chargebacks raises flags against your account. Eventually, his account was terminated, and Rich was added to a blacklist. “I didn't really know anything about credit card processing back then, and didn't understand how reversible those payments are,” he admitted.
To make matters worse, he explained that the credit card processor hadn’t deposited the original $9,000 into his account in the first place, due to an administrative error. That didn’t stop them withdrawing $7,000 in chargeback transactions and fees, though, putting him in deficit and incurring even more charges in the form of overdraft fees.
It took him a year to sort it out and limp away with some money. In the interim, he had closed the exchange down while he figured out a way to handle credit cards more effectively. In 2012, Rich reopened the site, this time with identity verification features, including options for users to upload a scan of their driver's license, to log in with their Facebook account, and to be geolocated using HTML5 in the browser (which he claimed is far better than geolocation by IP address).
Successful completion of all these tasks contributed to a trust score, which would help to decide whether a user’s order was processed or not. At this point, Rich was using a different credit card processor.
He said: “Those identity verification requirements helped me to do much better, and I reached about $45,000 in sales in the month of May 2013. However, about $4,500 of those were charged back, resulting in the termination of that account.”
The chargeback minefield
Clearly, credit card processing for merchants is harder than it looks. The rewards are ease and convenience, though, and depending on the customer demographic, are simply too tempting for some exchanges to resist.
Read more:
http://www.coindesk.com/how-fraud-sunk-bitcoin-exchange/