[mpeg]

I'm curious about how they're going to approach this from the fraud perspective. This is a $200 charge for a device that has 50TB storage, which would probably cost you around $2000 to buy.

There's people out there that will sign a contract under a fake name / address with a phone provider and sell the phones, and the way the providers fight against it usually by running credit checks and verifying address against them. Ultimately, this is very hard to detect when it involves identity theft.

[ececconi]

Let's say for the sake of argument that it costs about $100 per use to recover the machine from a labor/time perspective. That means they'll make back the initial investment on the machine in 20 uses. As long as the fraud rate is less than 5%, then this venture from a capital investment perspective still makes sense. Personally, if people intend on using fraud to get free hard drives it will probably be a minority of the population of people who order the services of this device. Plus, you need an AWS account for this.

[IgorPartola]

It's almost literally a black box. That means that they can have all manner of location tracking directly in the box. Perhaps couple that with some type of auto-destruct of the hardware inside if someone tries to temper with it, and it becomes very unappealing to try to steal this thing.

[ghshephard]

You can rent $10,000+ of cameras/lenses on your credit card through camera rentals places, though they will take a deposit on your card. Perhaps after Amazon is burned a few times, they'll require a deposit.

http://www.borrowlenses.com/product/Canon-EOS-C300-Mark-II-E...

[notatoad]

This isn't really all that useful unless you have a fairly large existing AWS deployment. If you try to open up a new account and order a 50TB storage device without provisioning anything else, they'll probably just refuse you. For normal users, amazon can just hold their AWS account hostage if they fail to return the device.

[luhn]

I can't imagine they care much. Snowball's value doesn't come from renting out these devices, it comes from companies dumping their data into AWS. If they lose a few devices they'll make it back in a couple months of S3 charges.

[vvanders]

Couldn't you just put a hold for $2k and release it when the device is returned?

[mpeg]

Yes, you could, the pricing page doesn't mention anything about it though, hence why I wonder.

[toomuchtodo]

Yes.

[unabridged]

You still need a credit card attached to the account. A car rental company will give you a $30k vehicle for under $100 on just a credit card.

[mpeg]

That's because you pick it up in person and they check / scan your id once you're there.