[evan_a_a]

>As a consumer, I thought I was safe; when saving my credit card to a billion dollar valued european merchant, or when i purchase something from supermarket and ignore the receipt, but the reality is slightly different from that.

>I got the money back via chargeback in short time.

So as evidenced, you are protected by the fraud infrastructure. The bank ate the loss for the fraud and you were made whole. In the end, the banking system cares about fraud loss. And they are exceptionally good at finding the fraud. Making changes to the card payment system is extremely difficult, due to the vast scale of the systems, so without a very good justification that a particular change will move the needle on fraud rates, the banks will opt to not make the changes.

[lxgr]

> The bank ate the loss for the fraud

Quite often, the merchant is unfortunately the one eating the fraud, which is creating a bit of a principal-agent problem (in that the issuing bank earns interchange on every transaction, so if they aren't liable for fraud, their default incentive would be to just approve as much as feasible and figure everything out later via chargebacks).

3DS changes that calculus quite a bit, though, and in-person payments are usually the issuing bank's liability as well.

[jonathanlydall]

Banks don’t really eat the loss, instead they ensure all their services have enough of a markup to cover the cost of fraud.

All consumers collectively pay for all the fraud, it’s just that we don’t tend to realize it as it’s not a specific line item on any of our bills, instead we all pay just a little more than we should for everything we buy.

[throawayonthe]

yes, obviously all of the bank's money comes from consumers. what other scenario do you see where a bank(etc) "eats the loss" but the money somehow comes from somewhere else

[jonathanlydall]

While it may be obvious to you that your fees include covering all the banks losses to fraud, I think that most people assume the bank makes less profit or something due to such incidents, when the truth is they just raise their prices to maintain profits.

[SkiFire13]

I don't see the difference between the two TBH.

[themafia]

If the rate of fraud reduced bonus payments to executives.

[spankalee]

> The bank ate the loss for the fraud and you were made whole

_If_ you notice the fraudulent charge.

[Sohcahtoa82]

It never ceases to amaze me how many people don't even look at their bank/credit card statements and just let their credit cards auto-pay.

Back when I was poor, I was logging into my bank and credit card accounts at least twice/week. I always knew within $20 how much money I had.

As a well-paid tech worker, I'm still checking at each paycheck (2x/month) and paying the credit card card off every time, but I'm still scanning the statements for any unexpected charges and to keep a pulse on my spending.

Fun anecdote, my wife started talking to me while I was scanning my statement once and she noticed there was a $20 charge from a business named "Your Side Chick" that she questioned in a joking way. It was from a food cart that specializes in chicken strips.

[Marsymars]

FWIW, I find looking at my statement and trying to remember if I actually made a random purchase of $8.63 to some unrecognizable name three weeks ago to be a much more difficult workflow than just enabling email notifications for every transaction so I can triage them quickly / at my convenience.

[what]

$20 for food cart chicken strips is the real scam.

[Sohcahtoa82]

The foot cart scene in the Portland metro area is really good. Those chicken strips were amazing and the sauce was superb. And despite hating both kale and cole slaw, their kale cole slaw was delicious.

[mothballed]

It's my experience that the bank will give up against a motivated chargeback counterparty.

My experience with ebay (stolen credit card) in particular was that things were going well until e-bay sent their stack of paperwork to my bank. Then my chargeback was reversed and shortly after that even my bank account was closed.

So you're not in the clear once you get your chargeback back. That is done initially while they give the other party time to respond. I think it took 30 days or so for ebay to bury me in paperwork, get the chargeback unwound again, and their schpeel was so effective that my bank themselves then accused me of being the fraudster.

As for

> The bank ate the loss for the fraud

I'm not 100% that's true. The entire reason why the chargebackee wants to contest it is because either the chargebackee or the chargebacker is eating the loss. The bank isn't eating that loss. There is no way E-bay would have bothered contesting my chargeback and paying their white collar workers for professional time researching if the bank was just going to eat it.

[NavinF]

in what country?

[mothballed]

USA. In USA your chargeback initially is usually taken on face. They'll usually reverse the charge within a week or so. But after that they let the merchant appeal it.

Most merchants won't. But if they do, your bank isn't going to bat for you. If it looks like it's going to take them much time or effort to deal with it they're liable to just throw up their hands and let you duke it out in small claims court.

In my case they had a megacorp ready to fight it on one side, and little old me on the other. So some lady on the phone just insinuated I was a lying scammer and told me my case had been reversed. There was some sort of appeal process I tossed my hat into but it went straight to radio silence and I've not heard from them in years. I would have taken them to court but I moved cross country around the same time and it would cost me $2000 or so for airfare and hotel rooms to show up to the right courts to get $1000 in judgements.

[evan_a_a]

I am a bit confused about your situation. Did you have a stolen card used to make a purchase at ebay that was not under your account? Or did you make a purchase at ebay and have an issue with the product you received?

[mothballed]

Scammer created two e-bay accounts. One with my name but e-mail address "pirate" something. A second one, a scammer merchant account to wash the money.

They stole my credit card and used the bogus "me" ebay account to generate invoices (to my real address) and payments for goods from the second scammer merchant account. Then they found tracking numbers to my zip code. They bought the (fake) items from their scammer merchant account using their scammer "me" account. They used those tracking numbers to show the items were shipped and received to someone in my zip code (which is the only publicly available data from the tracking number). Of course, at no point were any of the goods "purchased" by "me" even real, but rather just ways to wash the credit card returns.

When I discovered what happened, I requested ebay refund it. Ebay claimed that since the accounts weren't actually mine (only in my name) I had no right to request a refund. So I could claim they were mine and then be ineligible for a refund because the underlying reason would be vaporized, or not claim them as mine and then be unable to ask for a refund because it's not actually my account -- a catch 22. The tracking numbers, again, since they weren't actually to me, the shipping companies refused to reveal the underlying data to me and I couldn't get any of the evidence showing it wasn't me.

At that point, I had my bank do a chargeback. Which they initially granted. I thought it was a done deal at that point.

Ebay sent all these invoices matching my name, with tracking numbers to my zip code, with my credit card being billed, etc to my bank along with a bunch of pages of banking mumbo jumbo about how the chargeback was wrong. At that point my bank turned face, called me a liar, and reinstated the charges. Not long after this, I noticed e-bay shut down the scammer account but they never refunded me the money. I assume the scammer had sucked out the money faster than e-bay could act to claw it back and when e-bay realized they'd be holding the bag they decided to dump it on the fraud victims.

[NavinF]

You didn't provide any evidence that the charge was fraudulent. If they have a tracking number you gotta provide something, at least a police report.

Also you likely filed "merchandise/services not received" when you should have filed "unauthorized transaction". Even if you really did get the item, you don't have to pay for it if it was ordered by someone else using your card.

[lxgr]

> If it looks like it's going to take them much time or effort to deal with it they're liable to just throw up their hands and let you duke it out in small claims court.

In the US, couldn't you just make it their problem by not paying the disputed portion of your bill? (I haven't tried this myself and don't know how hard it is to dispute a negative credit report without going to small claims court in the end.)

[NavinF]

In theory yes, Reg Z forces them to prove that it was you that borrowed the money. In practice this is a weird situation to be in since chargebacks almost always favor the buyer so I have no idea how this shakes out and if it's worth temporarily screwing up your credit score