I was just starting off in life (kid, girl, job, apartment, bank, debit card, bills) when I made a 63-cent error with my bank account. Which is to say: If all of the negative debits and all of the positive credits were summed, then the account would have been in the negative by 63 cents.
I screwed up. And in a fair and just world, I'd owe the bank some extra tithing for quite clearly having spent some money that I very definitely did not have. Maybe $20 for the error and $10 per day spent in the red, plus the 63 cents, or something along those lines.
But it wasn't that way. Because the transactions were processed in batches that were re-ordered to be highest-first, I discovered that I owed the bank a little more than $430.
At the time (around 25 years ago, now) that was an absolute mountain of money to me.
The banker at the branch I went into was unapologetic and crass about the fees.
Looking over my transactions, they said "You know how to do math, right? You should have known that the account was overdrawn, but you were just out spending money willy-nilly all over town anyway."
I replied with something like "I made a single error of 63 cents. The rest of what you said is an invention."
This went back and forth for a bit before I successfully managed to leave the building without any handcuffs, fire trucks, or ambulances becoming involved -- and I still owed them more than $430.
The lesson I learned was very simple: Seriously, fuck those guys.
($12 billion in 2024, huh? That's all? Maybe the no-fee fintechs are winning.)
I'm having a very hard time seeing how you could describe this blog-post as either "propaganda" or "uninformed."
Do you mean something like: "This is true but irrelevant, Trump's going to keep flagrantly breaking laws, and Republicans in Congress are going to protect him from any consequences"?
Sure -- phishing is a huge problem, but it's also an argument to never build anything ever, because QR codes, sites, apps, emails, etc. can all easily be cloned and used as a phishing attack vector.
I'm not sure if the term "phishing" even applies here. The scam would be straight up fraudulent credit card billing -that most users wont even notice.
During the processing part, The scammers could very well just overbill the user by saying "Do you agree to $2 for parking?" and then charge the user $50. Then say a "We will hold $50 while the transaction is approved" just like a gas station.
Your service will get all the complaints and the scammer just gets the cash.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea or anything, however there are many bored smart teenagers and many hungry people with sliding ethics.
Hell, an even better scam is to copy your QR code from each unit and then bill the user for $X more as a "convenience fee" ... then auto-submit correctly to your service.
I mean, that might not even be illegal [in the sense that the customer agreed to the fee].
Invert the waveform of the copy-written music, then sync the music to the video, mix both audio streams causing the copy-written music to be effectively removed.
That purpose equates to over $12 billion in fees for 2024
https://finhealthnetwork.org/research/overdraft-nsf-fees-big...