> What if you're only getting a 5% fraud rate for something cheap

Something cheap turns into a $15 dispute fee.

Disputes automatically refund the amount disputed plus the fee. The onus is on the merchant to fight the dispute and claw the money back.

(Disclaimer: I used to work at Stripe on the dispute resolution team. I no longer work at Stripe.)

This is another case of the old assumption that businesses have more resources than their customers. It's something everyone in the financial/banking sector seems to assume and it drives me crazy. I run a nonprofit with less than 5000€ income yearly and a handful of volunteers. We have less time and money than one average person who wants to buy something from us or donate. If we got hit by a chargeback storm, we'd go bankrupt in a week.

5% is huge. Like, ban your business from taking credit cards huge.

Yep. Anything greater than 1% is leading to trouble such as huge fees or being kicked off a card network.

So you're saying all I need to do to knock a business offline is spam it with enough fraudulent CC numbers?

Yes you might be able to do that, at the risk of some personal liability because this is illegal. It’s also grossly unethical.

If your fraud has a large enough monetary value, large enough scale, or you work with another person on it, you can get hit with a serious felony charge and end up in prison for a few years. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or expert on credit card fraud.

I think people don't realize how much of the economy relies on agreements to not be a piece of shit.

Sort of like the highway system relies on an agreement not to play bumper-cars. There's nothing actually stopping anyone.

> There's nothing actually stopping anyone.

Self-preservation.

Why do I suddenly feel the need to buy a monster truck and take it for a spin at a highway?

We're actually working to provide this functionality as a service but it's currently stealth so I can't get into much more detail.

This is exactly the big issue no one is talking about. We are putting more and more pseudo security in customer protection but as a seller I am always in constant danger.

A chargeback with stripe costs like $15 for the seller. Even if the charge was only $1.5. Imagine the monetary problems you could create and the seller has no other way than to pay and hope to not get banned.

Yup, that's an attack that exists and is used regularly. It's not trivial to pull off, but is easy/accessible enough that competitors will sometimes do this to each other's web shops (I've heard of two cases of this just in last 3 years and that's in a city of only 300k people).

I have seen a business run with this dealing with mobile phones targeted by organised fraudsters. Moving "too fast" to notice and whoops profit is £0.2m not £3m.