patrick.net

Visa and Mastercard have some very relaxed return policies that screw merchants over all the time. If you've never run a credit card, you probably don't realize the costs involved in having it. Not just the transactional costs, but the costs in fraud and charge backs!

It's far easier to get a merchant account now, but it used to be you had to put up a huge bond for like 90 days + of expect sales in case of fraud or litigation. So if all your customers came back and complained they wouldn't be out any money. Now they don't really do that.

However, in a case like wikileaks the sheer amount of fraud is probably staggering. When hackers start getting involved, they start doing strange things. They'll buy stuff off your site just to see if you'll ship it. Like 5000 cogs! It's a game to them. Hackers are now getting involved with wikileaks, and I bet their rate of "donations" has skyrocketed with a staggering amount of fraud involved.

They might have been asked for the US to cut it off, but it's probably the liabilities they're exposing themselves to that are causing them to shut them down.

I remember when I worked as a programmer in Merchant Services. The amount of fees and charges is staggering.

What irked me always was the amount of legal anti competition policies that were allowed. Credit card companies could punish a merchant financially if they use competition. That wasn't cool.