On 10/25/05, Travis H. <solinym@gmail.com> wrote:
More on topic, I recently heard about a scam involving differential reversibility between two remote payment systems. The fraudster sends you an email asking you to make a Western Union payment to a third party, and deposits the requested amount plus a bonus for you using paypal. The victim makes the irreversible payment using Western Union, and later finds out the credit card used to make the paypal payment was stolen when paypal reverses the transaction, leaving the victim short.
This is why you can't buy ecash with your credit card. Too easy to reverse the transaction, and by then the ecash has been blinded away. If paypal can be reversed just as easily that won't work either. This illustrates a general problem with these irreversible payment schemes, it is very hard to simply acquire the currency. Any time you go from a reversible payment system (as all the popular ones are) to an irreversible one you have an impedence mismatch and the transfer reflects rather than going through (so to speak). CP