“We have never had a successful fraud attempt involving Bitcoin or Lightning”

[BitcoinVN_News]

Our team of BitcoinVN News* had recently the opportunity to catch up with Vietnam's "Bitcoin OG Merchant" David Watson of Future Travel.

David was the first business owner in Vietnam to accept Bitcoin in a professional way** almost a decade ago.

Back in 2016, he "battled" on stage on behalf of Bitcoin at Vietnam's first Bitcoin-centric conference with the local directors of Visa or Standard Chartered bank, and he hold up pretty well (old footage included in the article!).

David has been looking back on his experience of accepting Bitcoin (and more recently: Lightning) for the past decade as a merchant.

A man from the trenches, talking about the practicalities of Bitcoin as a merchant in the competitive & combative world of online commerce.

Besides that he also gave some updates on Vietnam and for who the place might be a good fit (and who will likely fail in Vietnam!).

If you do the numbers of say 20 fraud attempts a day on average, over 365 days a year and take it to 10 years in business, we have weathered more than 73,000 fraud attempts via credit cards.

While we see uncompleted Bitcoin/Lightning transactions over the same period as being less than 1000, and 90% would be attributed to non fraud factors if it was possible to track.

So we are looking at maybe 100 possible fraud attempts over 10 years (less than 1 per month) for Bitcoin versus 73,000.

As a merchant we have no worries with Bitcoin or Lightning payments for fraud. We have never had one successful fraud attempt on the platform when we accept Bitcoin or Lightning as a form of payment.

Vietnam has picked up its game for 3D security on cards and now most credit card fraud for banks here are seen (and always has) as being offshore bad players trying to defraud local merchants.

Full interview: https://bitcoinvn.io/news/david-watson-interview/

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*Part of BitcoinVN, Vietnam's premier Bitcoin Exchange since 2014

**Read: Not the all-too-common setup of the early days: The owner has a wallet app on his phone and if he's gone nobody knows what to do 

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[Ever-young]

As a merchant we have no worries with Bitcoin or Lightning payments for fraud. We have never had one successful fraud attempt on the platform when we accept Bitcoin or Lightning as a form of payment.

Bitcoin transaction does not create room for fraud I mean for you to be scammed that the transaction has been successful why it’s not like they do on some wire and credit card payment, I don’t know how they do it but fraud in card payment is increasing on a daily basis where they will use card process a payment in your point of sales or online store it will show successful receipt will be printed out but once’s you want to do account you will realize the transaction was a failed one or from a corrupt card.

When it comes to Bitcoin transaction you will track it on the blockchain explorer to be sure that the transaction is incoming or have undergo blockchain confirmation.

[avikz]

Well it's good for him as a business owner. But when you are comparing the number of fraud attempt with Visa and Mastercard network, you should also compare the user base. because Bitcoin's userbase is very miniscule when compared to these big networks. Probably that's one of the reasons why the number of fraud attempts are less because only a handful of consumers is using "Bitcoin as a payment" method.

Fraud is not at all a problem for Bitcoin. The problem is that, if a fraud happens, it's extremely difficult to track and recover the money with Bitcoin. That's why a lot of countries are yet to consider Bitcoin as a legal tender. It is relatively easy in the banking channel if you follow proper legal procedure.

[Die_empty]

Well it's good for him as a business owner. But when you are comparing the number of fraud attempt with Visa and Mastercard network, you should also compare the user base. because Bitcoin's userbase is very miniscule when compared to these big networks. Probably that's one of the reasons why the number of fraud attempts are less because only a handful of consumers is using "Bitcoin as a payment" method.

You points are very valid because one cannot compare the user base of Bitcoin and Visa or Masters cards. According to MasterCard statistics MasterCard statistics, almost 1.544 billion MasterCard debit cards are in circulation worldwide. It will be difficult to determine the amount of crypto users but a report puts at 420 million crypto users worldwide. It is normal to have more fraud attempts on credit cards than cryptocurrencies.

Fraud is not at all a problem for Bitcoin. The problem is that, if a fraud happens, it's extremely difficult to track and recover the money with Bitcoin. That's why a lot of countries are yet to consider Bitcoin as a legal tender. It is relatively easy in the banking channel if you follow proper legal procedures.

The decentralized nature of Bitcoin makes is very difficult for scammers to penetrate. I also suspects that people who use Bitcoin are more security conscious than those that use fiat, so scammers will target more credit card users.