Bitcoin Forum

I found some services offer Bitcoin against Credit Card. How do they mitigate the risk of chargeback ? Any idea ?

Can you give a couple examples so we can take a look at who is doing this (and then maybe speculate as to how they are mitigating risk)?

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/How_To_Buy_Bitcoins_With_Your_Credit_Card
You can find several ways to buy bitcoin with CC.
Some of the sites (such as Bittylicious) require ID verification, and some (like Virwox) have a low trade limit and high fees.

How fast is this happening ?

I figure most would go the Virwox route -- high fees and low limits, in order to mitigate the risk of chargebacks. I wonder how well that model works.

Well indeed im in fact have seen even an Ad here in the forum saying they accept credit card to sell bitcoins.. i dotn know how but they woulndt do that if they are not secure.

If u have seen it in the forum, then it is most likely a scam and they'll ask u to pat first. Pay first CC payment can be only be done to highly reliable merchants.

The site is indacoin, https://indacoin.com/change , it seems fishy but maybe someone already tried it.

They offer very little amounts that you are able to buy in one day and the price they charge is much higher then the market rate.

This makes it not worth many scammer's time and the trades that do go through successfully make a lot of money for the exchange

Looks like someone have used the site, but the thread is in Russian and I can't understand a single word in it.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=504268.0;all

I saw they were advertising here (banner ads) so I tried buying $20 worth of BTC from them. They seem to use a payment processor called eMerchantPay which I have never heard of but a Google search revealed nothing negative about them. After I put in my credit card details, they asked me for an authorization code which I was able to get after I called my bank. About two hours after I entered the code, the bitcoins arrived:

http://blockchain.info/tx/2deb120f9a90c8fa535363958d297cbc611e6b2c94eee7d2d6b35e57529173c6 (http://blockchain.info/tx/2deb120f9a90c8fa535363958d297cbc611e6b2c94eee7d2d6b35e57529173c6)

It cost me $20 USD for 0.029 BTC (or roughly $690 USD for 1 BTC) so it's a bit overpriced. Not sure how it is that they avoid chargebacks. The site owner seems to be a member here on the forums but all his posts are in Russian.

I did virwox way eventually, but it took a few tries.

I think u have not done it right by providing your CC details to an untrusted merchant. I have previous experience of paying for a less known hosting company with an untrusted payment processor. They activated recurring charge without explicit mention to me. They did not have even any option in the hosting to cancel the recurring. Cancelling were supposed to be done manually by convincing the sales team which was impossible. Ultimately I had to call my bank and ask them to permanently block that biller from charging me in future. Use of CC with untrusted merchant can be horro. Be careful and take preventive action.

I used a debit card linked to a bank account that I only keep $100 max in. And I could cancel any unwanted charges via the bank. But yeah, you're right. Normally I wouldn't have done it but I thought they would be cheaper than LocalBitcoins. Turns out the prices for both are pretty much the same.

Nice, anyway of the overprice spot they have, it could be good when you need some btcs quickly and secure and you cant make deposits to a trusted exchange, you are paying here like 15% more but by other ways you can be scammed 100%.

Hey guys, we got also a few comments on behalf of Indacoin.com team. We really appreciate that you ve been using our service and will do our best to make the exchange process more and more easy. At the current moment you could really buy bitcoins instantly . For that you just need enter an authorization code after the payment, that you can get by calling your bank. And in some banks such code is provided online. If you cant get the code we will ask you what type of the card you are using. If its a 3D secured card (This means that every Internet transaction will be protected with an additional verification check: you enter a secret code that is sent to the mobile phone number you registered with your bank or is printed on an access card that your bank previously issued to you) you could also send us a photo of the card instead of providing authorization code. If your card is not 3D secured, we ll have to request more info. Thats why we advise all our client to use only 3D-S cards -  anyway its much more safer for all Internet payments.
We would really appreciate any feedback  :)

These sites must estimate the percentage of reversals they'll have.

Then add a premium price greater than that percentage.

Right. They do all the math and figure out the averages and what price they can sell the btc at and make profit. They just calculate the risk vs reward and deal with the chargebacks.

I wonder how big the market is for legitimate bitcoin buyers who purchase with their credit cards.

Probably big enough. The problem is there's no easy way distinguish them.

Because there is no easy way to distinguish the good buyers from the bad buyers, the people/exchanges accepting reversible payments need to charge a pretty high premium to off-set the risk, which IMO makes the market quite small (ie only those aiming to buy a little bitcoin will use paypal or credit cards).

Buying bitcoin via a credit card on one of these kinds of sites is kind of like using a faucet in a sense that it may be good to allow you to get try and see how bitcoin works but is an very bad deal for users if they use it over the long term. 

Pretty much so.
I don't think people will use the sites repeatedly, paying a high premium.

So, in short, irreversible payment against irreversible payment is what makes both buyer & seller happy.

Well the one sending first could still get scammed, so they still need an escrow.

Very much unlikely so, but if they for example took out a loan in BTC and need to pay back the loan in BTC then they may be a repeat user if this is the only way they can purchase bitcoin

I don't think credit card would be the only way to buy bitcoin for many people.
People could choose from a bunch of exchanges if they don't mind verification, and they can use localbitcoins or bitcointalk to find people selling bitcoin.

If someone were to have zero cash and their only source of credit would be their credit cards. This happens to more people then you would imagine.

I just read that Circle is selling Bitcoin against credit card at the market rate. Howz that possible ? Are not they exposing themselves to forgery ?