Announcing SimpleCoin.com - Buying Bitcoins Just Got Simple - Launching Dec. 5th

[simplecoins]

We believe buying Bitcoins should be easy.  You shouldn't have to jump through hoops to buy them.  You shouldn't have to pay expensive premiums if you don't purchase them on an exchange.  You shouldn't have to lurk in IRC, dealing with complete strangers, to get a decent deal.  We truly believe these things, and thats why be built SimpleCoin.  Our goal?  To make buying Bitcoins simple.

SimpleCoin's service is pretty straight forward:

- Buy Bitcoins using your credit or debit card
- Have them delivered directly to your wallet, immediately at checkout time or soon after
- Our prices are updated minutely to reflect current market prices
- Our commission is fair, and tiered to customer risk analysis (complete price details will be announced shortly)
- Safe and secure, PCI Compliant, checkout process

How does SimpleCoin work?

We have our own merchant account, so we're not subject to the onerous terms of service agreements belonging to the likes of PayPal or Google Checkout.  We also understand risk management, or should we say, chargeback management. We have designed an order verification system which shouldn't be too painful to get through, but deter a lot of would be fraud. The system is not perfect, and chargebacks will still happen.  Those we'll leave to the aggressive collections agency we've teamed with. Our pricing is tiered so that proper levels of risk can be priced into purchases.  Returning customers obviously will receive better discounts than new customers.

SimpleCoin is launching December 5th for US customers.  We'll open up to international customers soon after in early 2012.

More details to come shortly...

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[zer0]

I only know 3-4 sites that take Visa for digital currencies, they do it 'under the table', for around 15-20% fees, and for max $250. if it's not through LiqPay then they only allow you to do it after passing a ton of verification.. so much that it deters potential fraud for such little amounts and also drives away most customers.

You do fully realize there are countless carding forums solely dedicated to defrauding so-called 'Fraud proof/scraping gateways' who will now be looking at your service to cash out instead of mass ordering Iphones and fencing them.

There's a guy in Ukraine now who sells this virtual fraud system where you enter cardholder address, at the push of a button it completely changes your IPs, hardware, browser and plugin profile/fingerprint to something random so you can card away Apple.com all day long without worrying about pesky VerO fraud scraping.This is the kind of well organized fraud you will have to go up against and Visa/MC will not help you at all, they'll just cancel your service once too many chargebacks start happening.

The only way to do this safely is to use high risk payment gateways so if something happens after 30 chargebacks in one week you can just switch to a new one without having Visa fux0r up your real merchant account. If it were easy to do this, you'd already see a million Visa 2 Ukash sites but you don't for a good reason

Debit/ATM card is a good idea though. Why no other exchangers doing this I don't know, since most gateways that take live payments through Interac/Poli/iDeal/ect don't allow refunds.

[Immanual Go]

There's a guy in Ukraine now who sells this virtual fraud system where you enter cardholder address, at the push of a button it completely changes your IPs, hardware, browser and plugin profile/fingerprint to something random so you can card away Apple.com all day long without worrying about pesky VerO fraud scraping.This is the kind of well organized fraud you will have to go up against and Visa/MC will not help you at all, they'll just cancel your service once too many chargebacks start happening.

Wow, that's interesting.

[simplecoins]

You do fully realize there are countless carding forums solely dedicated to defrauding so-called 'Fraud proof/scraping gateways' who will now be looking at your service to cash out instead of mass ordering Iphones and fencing them.

We hope that we didn't imply the chargeback problem was trivial, it's not.  We don't take the task lightly, we understand that's what has kept products like ours from market.

In fact, SimpleCoin's business is not really about selling Bitcoins, it's about risk management.  I guess time will only tell how effective our verification process is.  We will also be very swift in making the process stricter if we do see a lot of fraud.  But for the scenario you described, the system the Ukraine guy is selling, those aren't guaranteed to get passed our verification.  For example, all orders are verified by phone, and we only accept landlines and mobile phones (no voip or prepaid mobile) with a few other rules to boot.  If the carder is savy enough to get by our system, they're not going to be getting away with too much loot.  New customers will have restrictions on order amounts.

[boonies4u]

Does this "aggressive collections agency" know what it is you will be selling?

[zer0]

That sounds reasonable, if the service works as advertised you can just eat the fraud if limits are low and not enticing for fraud because you'll have so much business. As long as you're bcrypting passwords and have other security, so your database isn't cracked and some carder can log in with an already verified account and start frauding away with a new card.

To scam you (i wouldn't, hypothetical situation) I would create cards out of dead fullz, which can last for 2-3 mos if set up properly. These are new cards issued to stolen identities. I would either rent a landline spoofing service to take the verification calls which is a team of people in Belarus or somewhere who just take calls all day to verify card and bank requests. Or just get phone contracts with the same stolen identities, as most organized carders do anyways with dead fullz and just switch out the SIMs. I would buy the limit for an entire month or two to get my limit raised, or provide other phony scans, then hit you with $16k in stolen funds from a dozen different accounts and walk away with bitcoins. Good payday for somebody living in Romania or China who's only investment is ~$100 to get the dead fullz, and a couple of months waiting to raise limits. They are already doing this on poker sites. Most of their income is from fencing Apple products where they only get 40% return, if they use your service they get 100% return and it's untraceable through bitcoin laundering to western union, so prepare for the hordes if there's a way to get $1k or more with Visa at some point.

If you can find ways around all these problems then you'll definitely have a popular service.

LiqPay when they first opened had perhaps the world's best anti fraud measures and were doing up to $500-1k in transaction after card verification and they were robbed blind. Now limits are $250 unless your bank responds to a fax sent by LiqPay authorizing the transaction, which no western bank will do as that's a violation of privacy to hand out customer info even to other payment gateways. You have to give your bank written authorization and pay them a fee to respond to the faxes, and still they tend not to do it.

[simplecoins]

Does this "aggressive collections agency" know what it is you will be selling?

"aggressive collections agency" was tongue-in-cheek   We are however working with a collection agency that understands our product, and customers will have to agree to our very strict no-refund policy and collections agreement.

[Mushroomized]

Keeping my eye on this.

[miernik]

For example, all orders are verified by phone, and we only accept landlines and mobile phones (no voip or prepaid mobile)

Mobile phones but not prepaid mobile?

1) you are excluding a larger half of potential customers, who only use prepaid mobile.

2) even if you want to, usually there is no way you can distinguish a prepaid from a contract mobile number just by the number. You'd have to ask for a scan of the phone bill. If I'd where to so much trouble, I'd rather just send a wire to Hong-Kong.

[btc_artist]

Watching.

[ALPHA.]

I've had the idea of using collection agencies. I am glad to see there is a great mind out there that has had this idea and acted on it.

[Yankee (BitInstant)]

For example, all orders are verified by phone, and we only accept landlines and mobile phones (no voip or prepaid mobile)

Mobile phones but not prepaid mobile?

1) you are excluding a larger half of potential customers, who only use prepaid mobile.

2) even if you want to, usually there is no way you can distinguish a prepaid from a contract mobile number just by the number. You'd have to ask for a scan of the phone bill. If I'd where to so much trouble, I'd rather just send a wire to Hong-Kong.

Also, in places like Japan, no one has landlines anymore! Landlines are becoming technology of the past

[simplecoins]

Just wanted to update this thread.  SimpleCoin is launching Dec. 5th

[simplecoins]

Mobile phones but not prepaid mobile?

1) you are excluding a larger half of potential customers, who only use prepaid mobile.

2) even if you want to, usually there is no way you can distinguish a prepaid from a contract mobile number just by the number. You'd have to ask for a scan of the phone bill. If I'd where to so much trouble, I'd rather just send a wire to Hong-Kong.

We understand we will be excluding customers with this policy, and we may decide to accept prepaid mobile numbers at a later date.  However, at launch, we won't be accepting them in order to reduce fraud.

We can actually determine the type of phone number that is provided by the customer automatically, so no manual process will be required on their part to prove which type they have.

[BurtW]

Interesting.  I will give it a try once you open.