I consider myself reasonably financially and technologically savvy, but I was rushed while I was doing this and occupied with other trip details thought I was just ticking one item off my to do list and didn’t think about it that hard.
A negative tip from Monzo or anything else would have made me stop and think. It took me 30 seconds to find out it’s not legit, but that was AFTER I had paid.
My suggestion here is trying to think if there is any place for Monzo to prevent this type of thing happening to other people whether you want to call it a scam or not.
They had to carefully nurture that score after a lot of targeted negative reviews. Review sites exist simply to profit from businesses struggling to keep up appearances, in my opinion.
I don’t think they add any real value to customers, and are too susceptible to manipulation.
Yeah, this is a difficult one. I don’t think it would pass a Goods and Services chargeback because the service was technically provided.
We could do something in this area around education - I’m thinking a generalised blog post if there are a handful of examples of this sort of thing, the one case is probably too niche to justify a post.
But I’m not sure what we could do on a technical/product level.
The feature would be opt-in and based on Monzo users reporting problems with specific merchants.
The notion of ‘reviews’ is being misconstrued. I’m not suggesting anyone can go write a review and affect ratings. This could be Monzo users that have actually made a payment and later reported a problem.
It baffles me why more information is a bad thing. Wouldn’t you rather know if the site/merchant you’re about to spend money with had 100 existing complaints from other Monzo users that have spent money and regretted it?
Technically, this is very simple. Monzo user reports a problem with a merchant via a ‘report a problem’ button on the transaction line. Get enough, and users that opted in to the feature get an alert when they attempt to purchase from a merchant from the list. That’s not difficult.
Legally - card schemes already use sophisticated black lists. TrustPilot et al exist that offer public opinions that anyone can write - even unverified non-customers. This would be limited to Monzo users that have purchased. What’s the legal implication of a user being able to report a problem and surface that feedback to other Monzo users that have requested it?
You’re describing the implementation from a UI/UX standpoint with (seemingly) little regard for the other development (let’s call it “technical”) work involved in implementing such a feature, eg storing these reviews, moderating them to detect and prevent abuse, altering the payment process to implement this warning.
Admin/moderation-wise, you’ll need a defined, designed, developed, staffed system for moderating reports, preventing abuse and providing a means of appeal to affected merchants, not to mention good-faith merchants that may reasonably and unknowingly share processing facilities with bad-faith merchants. For example, this week I made a purchase at Uniqlo and it was processed by JR Rail – what if a bad-faith merchant also uses JR Rail for payment processing? Will my next attempt to top-up my travel card require confirmation? What if I have no reception or battery and I’m miles from home? The scope for unintended consequences is far and wide, and “you opted in” won’t seem like a valid rebuttal in this kind of case.
Now for the reason I used “good-faith” and “bad-faith” in the previous paragraph instead of harder terms like “legitimate” and “scam”.
Legally, card schemes use black lists that are focused on limiting fraud. You’re not talking about limiting fraud, you’re talking about blocking transactions from merchants whose customers exhibit what is legally likely nothing more than buyer’s remorse. Block the wrong transaction and fingers will be pointed from and in all directions. So add legal fees and compensation to the list of considerations.
I’m not trying to stifle your creativity here - it’s great that Monzo facilitates the discussion of product ideas here . It’s just a pet peeve of mine, as a developer, to hear that something is technically “simple to implement” or “technically, very simple” when it just isn’t.
For context, I’m quoting it from 25 years of programming experience in the e-commerce and payment processing space, working on very large back-end systems.
The ‘review’ aspects aren’t necessarily as arduous as you’re suggesting. This would could work like any other community driven ‘report a problem’ system, based on a number of complaints over a certain time velocity.
I grant that there would be certain challenges around identifying end-merchants of aggregate payment processors, but this is the same problem space as identifying a merchant used for other purposes, such as categorising payments, geo-identity, and reporting problematic end-merchants for fraud. Many aggregate processors offer some concept of sub-MID or billing descriptor customisation that can help with this.
I think whether or not something constitutes a ‘scam’ is an unnecessary distinction for this use-case. The purpose of this feature would be to raise awareness of problematic merchants based on the total number of users that have reported ‘issues’ (of any category) as a % of all volume with a merchant, over a time window. If 95% of users reported a problem over the last 3 months, I’d consider this is a clear indication of likelihood that my experience is likely to mirror those that came before me. Likewise, if 2 people complained of a problem out of 20,000 in the same window, it’s likely noise that can be ignored.
My point is, these are relevant data points. If Monzo can figure out a way to make that data usable for a wider audience, surely that’s better than no data at all?
The same can be said of any online feature. What if you have geo location enabled? Or two factor auth? Or want to freeze your card while you’re without a signal?
IMO, that’s a trade-off the user has to consider when they enable/disable the feature
Again, I don’t think the distinction is necessary. If 95% experienced what you might deem ‘buyer’s remorse’, it’s irrelevant whether or not it’s technically legal. The point would be surfacing buyer’s feedback so the user can take that into account for their purchase.
No different to the mechanisms of research already available to a would-be purchaser, except at the POS when it counts most.
Mine too, but I’m not suggesting this as someone who sees a website as a few pretty buttons to click on. I have worked on a number of large-scale transactional gateways where I had to deal with low-level anti-fraud systems, in the days before Stripe Radar et al. Many of these same considerations wound up making it to production, albeit with a scope that was limited/relevant to the marketplace I worked with.
I’m not suggesting this is without challenges, or a few lines of code. It’d take some thought, especially around mechanisms for guarding against false positives, and ensuring the UX is useful.
However, I do think that Monzo’s clout in ‘aggregating’ payment data and enabling some mechanism to employ the wisdom of the crowd to surface relevant information in a meaningful/useful way to future purchasers as a concept, has merit. In a layer below out-and-out fraud, there exists many shades of problematic merchant that may skirt the legal definition of ‘scam’ but are otherwise likely to frustrate a very large percentage of purchasers.
I’d personally welcome sort kind of alert when I’ve inadvertently stumbled upon one, in the same way I welcome an alert that a phone number calling me is likely to be a telemarketer ahead of picking up the phone. It’s useful data, and while not illegal, helps inform the user’s decision.
This requires costs for development and ongoing costs for policing it. Monzo is bleeding money, and this project offers no benefit to them. It’s not going to happen.
I suspected from your domain-specific vocabulary that your experience in this field was more illustrious and more extensive than mine.
I am not contesting the merit of such a feature, nor its feasibility in a company with unlimited resources and no other clear and pressing priorities, said unintended consequences notwithstanding.
I was contesting your assertions that it would be…
From your latest reply you clearly understand it wouldn’t be.
The website isn’t a scam and you’ve got exactly what you paid for. Not taking care and paying attention to the details is your problem. I know it sounds harsh but it’s the plain reality.
Those business don’t operate in good faith, for sure, but it’s still a legitimate business.
How about the moral standpoint and, as I’ve said before, how does this amazing system deal with nefarious agents hell bent on screwing the system in their favour. How is that going to be regulated? The power of the crowd has yielded disappointing results recently, how would this be any different?
It would surely need oversight, fact checking, et al which, even once built, would remain a large commitment for a very niche feature.
I probably should have qualified that statement with very simple compared to other anti-fraud systems/measures
With a payment system I worked on about a decade or so back, we had a big issue with referral fraud. A promoter would run a list of stolen cards through their affiliate link, in the hope of earning a commission. At first, we thought we’d hit the jackpot… it was only after a month or so that the chargebacks came rolling in, and we’d already started making payouts, that we had to figure out a way to discern legit orders from fraudulent ones.
That was a tough challenge. The data was very diverse; the stolen cards would come from multiple countries, and the scammers were pretty sophisticated, using multiple VPNs and IP proxies to simulate being close to the supposed custom they were emulating. We wound up with all manner of algorithms to determine velocity of orders in a given time window, browser fingerprinting, applying limits to payouts and requiring ID verification of affiliates, manually calling up customers to confirm, etc. We had a pretty high transactional volume to contend with and plenty of legit referrers. The trickier parts were figuring out a way to flag the bad transactions but not dissuade the good guys from increasing volume.
This is, in a small way, what Stripe Radar and other systems do nowadays. They do it in a much more sophisticated way, aggregating data from millions of purchases and using machine learning to recognise patterns, as well as allow all manner of threshold settings and other controls that a company can opt in to and tweak as needed.
The reason I mention that is, by contrast, I think the feature proposed here could be relatively simple. Just a mechanism to report individual negative experiences, and in some way surface that if it tends to happen at scale.
I totally acknowledge it’s not perfect – I’m not sure any ‘fraud’ system is (and I don’t think fraud is even the right term here-- more just the reporting of categorised negative experiences, maybe). There will be some who try to game it, and others who get innocently swept up with bad reports. We all know there are people who just have a problem with everything, and will hit ‘report a problem’ because they don’t like the colour of the box their product arrived in. It’d need some basic algo to employ the wisdom of the crowd, and separate signal/noise. But I think there’s a kernel of an idea here that could be worked.
In any case, this is just a thread for suggestions. There may not be the motivation for it, or the implementation may work out to be unfeasible. Or Monzo may just not have the resources or interest in tackling it.
My main point is that the OP’s situation is actually relatively common. Plenty of smart people fall for these kinds of dubious sites, purchased in haste or just based on asymmetric information. I’ve seen very highly experienced developers fall victim to phishing attacks or social engineering, who would normally know better, but let their guard down one time.
Rather than punishing that behaviour with I-told-you-sos and you-should-have-known-betters, I think a more data driven approach of surfacing information would be helpful, if there’s a way to do it that the outcome is better than not having the feature at all.
I don’t know that this is definitely the case here, but I think it’s worth considering at least.
Honestly, I have no idea. The motivation to upkeep ratio might be so low, that it doesn’t warrant the investment.
But I wouldn’t dismiss it without due consideration.
Take Honey. They’ve just been acquired by PayPal for $4b. It’s a browser extension that aggregates coupon/promo codes at the point of purchase. There’s already a massive market for coupon codes - a quick Google search yields a bunch, and anyone can go find them prior to purchase.
In a similar thought experience, Honey may seem useless. If the info is already there, why put it in an app? Don’t users already know to go looking for codes prior to making a purchase? Yet the vast majority of purchases never do, despite leaving millions of pounds on the table. Same thing with the cashback sites. There’s an asymmetry of information that opens a gap for an aggregator / convenience app such as this to surface the information at POS.
My only real point is that I think some way of distilling negative past experiences with a merchant and using that as an advisory would seem helpful vs. shopping blind.
Same thing with any information source, really. You probably won’t rely on review sites exclusively - you’re aware they’re often gamed and there’s gonna be a % of noise in the ratings from competitors/disgruntled customers/people who went to school with the owner and are jealous of their success/born whingers. But you can at least factor the overall rating along with your past experiences with the merchant, your gut instinct, the professionalism of the company you’re buying from, and a host of other factors.
I think this could be useful if done properly, but admittedly this is just a kernel and ‘properly’ is TBD.
It’s worth causing a fuss over. A few years ago if you searched for the EHIC (European Health Insurance Card), which is FREE, the ads all took you to legitimate websites which charged you to apply for it. All they did was pass on your details to the official site. It got a lot of press attention and Google banned the ads.
. It’s just a pet peeve of mine, as a developer, to hear that something is technically “simple to implement” or “technically, very simple” when it just isn’t.
I probably should have qualified that statement with very simple compared to other anti-fraud systems/measures