Can iCloud's "Hide My Email" put your credit card info at risk?
Can iCloud's "Hide My Email" put your credit card info at risk?
The primary reason I force-unsubscribed a Substack user
For some email marketers, including retailers, who use paid (and free) newsletters like Substack, the iCloud “Hide My Email” option may be no big deal—or a very big deal—when it comes to subscribers.
Over the past year, a paid Substack user had been dutifully paying for a subscription for several months and actively opening emails. Then something strange happened. The earnings for that Substack account were oddly lower—the result of Stripe’s new rule (as of November 10, 2022) to increase their card transaction fees from 2.9% + $0.30 to 3.4% + $0.30 in the United States.
“This price increase reflects the cost of higher fraud rates associated with collecting customer card details by phone or other unencrypted sources,” Stripe said in a recent report. “Directly typing in sensitive customer data bypasses much of the security that’s built into Stripe’s online payments. As a result, we see higher fraud rates on manually entered payments, leading to higher costs for Stripe.
But why should it matter if credit card information is typed in manually as a onetime payment or not? If the card works and no fraud is proven, why should the merchant receive lower pay? While I didn’t agree with this initially, I noticed a parallel between the time the manual payment was made and a nosedive in this user’s activity level the same week—and for two more months. Is it possible that iCloud’s “Hide My Email” can be used for credit card fraud?