What type of fraud exactly? You mean like stolen CCs? It feels very medieval as a financial trust system if every little vendor can’t trust payments, even when you pay up front? Like this is in some ways worse than cold hard cash. And then we pay VISA premium on top of that, for the convenience of being mistrusted..
If they pay up front then dispute, the company will suffer extra charges. With enough of reports, their payment processor fee% goes up and impacts all their payments.
Paying up front doesn't really mean much, because if the credit card info is stolen, the actual owner will report the transaction and it will be reversed.
Right but that sucks. So CC companies/banks are simply shifting risk from one side of the transaction to the other. Sure, as a consumer you don’t have to worry because you’ll get your money back. But if the merchant has to worry and reject customers who are “suspicious” to protect themselves then you’re back to square one, except more kafkaesque. That’s why I said cash is better.
I’d rather have $10 permanently lost for a month of VPS than being banned after 5 days setting it up because I’m traveling and my IP is “suspicious”. Which has happened to me.
Hetzner is actually worse. Current EU directives allow liability shift in online payment when the customer is authenticated via 3D Secure, meaning the risk is extremely low and the onus of proving the fraud is on the card owner. Yet Hetzner will not accept your money if your name doesn’t look correct for the country you are accessing from.
