[jliptzin]

As a merchant, I am the one responsible. When a stolen credit card gets used on my site, I am the one that has to pay for that (assuming Stripe does not block it through fraud prevention). Which is fine, because my fraud rate is very low. But it's an odd situation because in effect I am being penalized for someone else's lax security. Sure I could try to come up with my own fraud prevention algorithm but I highly doubt that as a small vendor I could beat Stripe in that department. So it doesn't matter how well I'm protecting my customer's card data, the fact is if someone's info is stolen from some other site or an atm skimmer or somewhere else, and then the perpetrator buys product from my site, I have to pay for that carelessness.

Personally I think the banks should be paying for the bulk of this fraud out of the 2-3% transaction fees, not merchants who may not have anything to do with the problem. This way, there's strong incentive to actually issue secure cards and improve security. Right now, it's no skin off their backs, so nothing is improving.

[ryanlol]

>Sure I could try to come up with my own fraud prevention algorithm but I highly doubt that as a small vendor I could beat Stripe in that department.

You're seriously overestimating the fraud protection Stripe does.