Someone thinks Grandcentral should be criminalized

Original post is here

Excerpt:

…Companies like Grand Central should be put out of business – they pose a threat to every online merchant who accepts credit cards.

By offering a service where you can get a phone number in any US city and that furthermore you can receive and send calls from your real phone that are routed through that number they have made the best fraud checking tool, call verification, essentially useless…

My reply on his post:

Your wrong in some aspects.

The Merchant when verifying the card number with the credit card company in online transactions can verify the phone number matches to what’s tied to the account. If the merchant decides not to utilize this functionality and verification it’s their own fault.

You can (and have for a couple decades) been able to purchase a voicemail box anywhere in the world for a couple dollars a month and usually the voicemail has it’s own unique number. Most of these services also offer call forwarding.

Finally the largest gap in your theory that you is the cell phone market – I can literally go to Wal-Mart and pick up a disposable cell phone today for 15.00 that comes with 60 minutes of talk time.

If you want to criminalize grandcentral for their behavior you have to take into account this other avenues for performing the same fraud in the same method.

The cost of entry is very low and I can say that I have never gotten a call from any online merchant I a have dealt with in my 13 years on the Internet. I have however gotten a couple bounce backs where a charge going through where my phone number didn’t match what the credit card company had on file for me.

UPDATED

His response

Creeva – you have some good points. However I work in the data center business as sales manager for a large data center. Roughly 40% of all server orders are attempted frauds. I have a lot of tricks up my sleeve for determining order authenticity, most of which I won’t discuss for obvious reasons, but this is going to hurt us. Not all frauds are CC – many are stolen PayPal accounts and there’s no way to check phone numbers on those. Not all banks use full authentication on the cards – they don’t require the address/phone number to match their records when the card is processed just name, number and PIN. Hell, even some of the foreign banks (our customer base is world wide) don’t even use a PIN (CVV) on the cards. In general it is only North American banks (and not all of them) that require the details to match.

My follow-up:

So you feel the barrier to entry from a offering a service such as this by making it free (though you still need a phone to verify to grandcentral) would be drastically different from hard core fraudsters (I hate that term but applicable) over a 15 dollar cell phone?

I guess it would depend on the type of fraud and or the amount that you are working with whether that few dollars could make a difference.

The problem really is more on the credit cards company side for not enforcing these security audits.

One thing retailers could do to help offset this (and google may actually give you this data versus data that ties a customer to their private data) is to have them give you the phone exchanges they utilize their pools of addresses from.

This work by picking new/underutilized/never utilized exchanges in a zip code. So you know if they use the exchange 541-256-XXXX or 789-986-XXXX that these are utilized by google or farmed out to SIP providers for similar things – this would allow you to blacklist address blocks on your side.

This allows people to maintain their privacy since the information is only aggregate. They can make the choice if they wish to shop with you if you won’t accept it. You can blacklist the exchanges you don’t wish to accept. If disposable cell phones use the same technique (I’m next to positive alot of them are in these same blocks that grandcentral is using) it would correct that issue also.

While this would not be foolproof and 100% it actually would give your company significantly better trust then it has right now.

So where do I send the consulting bill to

Theoretically in an afternoon you could get about 70-90% of the exchanges that grandcentral uses and have them added to your blacklisted do not call database.

UPDATED

His final reply:

Alas the consulting bill will have to wait This is a strategy we are already contemplating if Google will release that information as I alluded to in the post. Somehow I doubt they will but perhaps they will see it as yet another way to monetize their investment in those blocks.

You wouldn’t necessarily lose those potential customers – you could make it clear that GC and free cell phones will not be accepted but most of those individuals, the honest ones at least, have the real number they can provide, the one that GC forwards to and from that they can provide if they want the service.

I think we’ve now beat this horse to death.

Complaints on Grandcentral

I’ve drank then kool-aid and I can say I am a Google fan boy, for the most part. Though the company has the motto “Do No Evil” – motto’s change over time and the power of the information they hold is probably some of the most valuable in the world. Temptation begets evil. This post however is not about the evils can do, it is about one of their newest acquisitions – grandcentral.

For those that don’t know what grandcentral is – the rough answer is that it’s a service that gives you a virtual phone number and that phone number will ring multiple phones to hunt you down. Now there are a lot of cool uses for this service so don’t get me wrong about my complaints, they are just really big annoyances that let’s me give this service a 7 out of 10.

1. You can not make your own groups with their own rules. You have to fit everything into the predefined groups – which include friends, family, work, web button, and other. The need to create your own groups is a must that is currently missing.

2. I can’t play the web messages on my palm TX – ok that’s Palm’s fault not Google’s, but I wanted three things.

3. If you are in a household where there are more then a single user of grandcentral you have to fight who get’s the home phone number. When husband, wives, children, room mates lives together and they both use grandcentral only one of them can use the home phone number in their profile. This is the largest complaint I have since adopters are likely to be families and almost all of them would want their home phones to ring – but the first person to lay claim get’s the number. I understand the need to limiting the amount of number recycling – but to get around this I would say pick a number of times a number can be re-used (2-4) it must be designated as a home number (though thinking about shared work numbers is a whole new ball game) and finally have a mutual authentication with the user who first registered and verified that number to make sure that this is indeed someone who should have access to that number.

If number 3. where solved this would take grandcentral to a 9/10 service – add all the issues it would get an 11/10 – curse you palm.

Information Overload – You can no longer be Invisible

Ok – the title in an of it’s self is a bit sensationalistic, but the truth of the matter isn’t so far off.

I’ve been using grandcentral for a while now and I can tell you I love the service. I love being able to manage my life from my email in-box also. Now all my blog backups, individual RSS feeds, my faxes, and my phone calls all come to my in-box. The downside of this is that I do not have a method of denying that I received a communication (though I have a digital paper trail if I did not).
I have instructed almost all of my family to contact my grandcentral number if they wish to reach me. So if my father was going to call me he would dial my Grandcentral number. From here grandcentral rings my home phone, my cell phone, my work phone, and my google talk IM address. So it’s kind of hard to dodge that call from someone I don’t like, but unless you are on my contact list – you go straight to voicemail. I unfortunately hate SMS so I don’t receive notifications (and get a cheaper phone bill to boot). If I did use SMS I would use twitter with it and it would take up way too much personal time.

My faxes route through eFax and then get delivered into my email inbox. This allows me to have a free fax number that deposits faxes into my email box without giving out too much private info since the number can be changed on a whim.

We have our online information flooding the internet pathways with RSS feeds that is causing rabid de-aggregation of data – which data owners like myself are trying to get the data aggregated again in a workable format. All this leads to gigs upon gigs of personal data (when you consider the bandwidth of email, video, pictures, RSS feeds times teh number of subscribers, VOIP) which is in the end pretty mundane stuff but yet each thing we do leads to a large cascade of the continuance of bandwidth.

I don’t know it’s just a rant that I’m having – more to follow.

Phone Service Triple Crown

Well recently getting a grandcentral invite I was planning on writing up a review – this is more likely to come to tomorrow. In the interim I thought I would offer up some phone service solutions for the rest of your voip technology habit

Free 1-800 phone calls to any listed number. Here is the essence f this trick – call the phone number 1-800-FREE411 – this takes you to an ad supported 411 service. After you dial the 800 number and listen to the ad it then takes you to directory service – you put in the customer you wish to contact and it then connects you for free. Added bonus to this – Skype allows you to call 800 numbers for free even if you are not subscribed to SkypeOut. So if you have a microphone on your computer you can call anyone as long as they are not unlisted for free.

Free International calls – there are supposedly 2 ways (here and here) to do this. Both use the same service- and this is a way for your cell phone subscribers to get around international fees on the go.

Using your grandcentral number to receive text messages

Getting grandcentral on your cellphones web browser by going to this site in your cell phones browser. If your cell phone can play MP3’s it is able to play your messages from the site itself.

If you have the 5 Faves plan from t-mobile and don’t care about caller ID from the true caller to grandcentral here is a neat trick to lowering your monthly bill.

Here is another service not as complete as grandcentral that allows you a free voicemail box. It is run by netzero. Essentially all this is good for on the free side is the ability to have a disposable VM box.

Another competitor offers free incoming calls to AIM – maybe add this number on your grandcentral list?

And in closing we’ll end with another great Google service – Goog411.

OK I managed to do more then a triple – but I hope some of these tricks might help you out.