[conformal]

your scenario sounds like an ideal use case for a service we recently released, Coinvoice (https://coinvoice.com/). Coinvoice allows you to invoice in USD and receive Bitcoin (BTC) without forcing your customers to use BTC.

i have myself had a number of issues with banks in the past and can speak to the irritation it can cause when you're trying to do business. Bitcoin is a great way to get around banks that are uncomfortable with your line of business or that add too much complexity to your business.

[zorked]

That's very nice, congratulations. Isn't there a way to work around the risk of chargebacks? Requiring an "insurance" deposit and passing charges on to your customers, or holding payment for some amount of time?

[conformal]

i've run a few other businesses in the past that had some serious credit card and paypal fraud problems. to give you an idea of how bad it can get, i have been charged back USD 30K in credit card charges by a single customer who was running an extremely creative fraud system. the secret service ending up getting him, which was vindicating, but you can't get blood from a stone...

i'll have another think about it, but i expect that accepting credit cards is not going to happen. additionally, the fees would have to be pretty hefty for running such a payment gateway since it would (our fee) + (credit card processing fees).

[dobbsbob]

You could always try an informal payment scheme. Find existing storefronts that have MSB licenses that do currency exchange, ask them to take payments for you. End of the day they deposit to your business account. Now you can have cash accepting storefronts. Find an easy yet secure method for these stores to notify you of cash payment and release the coins.

This is better than cash deposit directly to your bank account because of MITM fraud attacks, and because banks hate people coming in to deposit cash and quickly try to shut down the account. Again I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if you'd need a license for this in the USA but overseas it would work in countries that need this service, like Pakistan/Philippines/India.

EDIT: I would imagine, if you do quite well, you could sign a 1:1 agreement with companies like Bitpay who are looking for USD, and have BTC, and you have USD and are looking for BTC. win/win

[sillysaurus2]

Would you mind describing his method of swindling you out of $30K? Surely it wasn't a single transaction... Was it a single credit card? Did he use multiple cards with different names? Or we're they all same name + same address?

[conformal]

he was using many cards with many addresses and billing names. i didn't have a system in place to catch this behavior at the time, and it was totally on me for not having proper countermeasures in place.

iirc there were like 15 different billing addresses and card numbers in a few month period. once i saw that i knew i was going to get fucked on chargebacks.

his fraud scheme was so creative i'm not going to describe it here, for wont of someone decided to imitate it.

[code_duck]

I'm not sure whether not describing the swindle method is more like security through obscurity or responsible disclosure. Wouldn't it be it be good to let people know what this guy was doing so we can all protect ourselves against such methods?

[rhubarbquid]

Could you describe the countermeasures without giving away the scheme?