Hi Aironeous,
Thanks for making another purchase, I’m glad you’re enjoying the service. This is really the main reason that the top up amounts remain low, to lower the amount of risk that I’m open too from that type of fraud. The majority of payment processors have a similar situation in terms of charge backs. We do have the option to challenge any dispute and can provide solid evidence of providing the purchased item as described, to the wallet address supplied by the buyer at time of purchase. Of course, it depends on who PayPal decides to side with.
I think you’re right in terms of keep the top ups the same size. I need to strike a balance between giving users what they want, and keep myself safe. Richard mentioned FIAT-ETN pairings on an exchange soon. I would imagine that would be NEXT exchange from what’s been said in the past. I think this would provide a FIAT-ETN facility that would be able to deal with higher amounts.
I think us filling in the slot to allow users who can’t use NEXT exchange/any exchange/can’t purchase is what we’re looking at going forward. Of course I’m continuing to improve the site and the top up system along with that so perhaps with managing to reduced the fee’s and creating a better infrastructure on our side to deal with top-up sales we could offer a similar service.
Our top-up service was never created to try to challenge with big exchanges, however, more to create an opportunity to allow those who couldn’t get into Electroneum from being isolated and missing the chance of a lifetime. Too many people, face too many barriers, all across life. It’s extremely unfair that anyone should be disallowed the same opportunities that some of us take for granted.
I will 100% look into both of these services you’ve mentioned and thanks for bringing them to my attention.
Unfortunately, we’ve been under attack since about the send week in June! We’ve had Cloudflare protection available since just before the top up card system went live. This was to give us some extra security, even though all payments are processed off-site through PayPal. We also have numerous other things going on in the background from a security point of view.
I’m also implementing 2FA over the admin account as an extra layer. We have suffered denial of service attacks, and currently, brute force attacks have shot up. These are mainly on my account and have been successfully denied and protected against. Over the past 24 hours, I’ve seen an attack that is obviously working from a list of pawned email addresses, although none of them have ever registered with us. It’s important that everyone keeps an eye on their email addresses and checks them through the haveIbeenpawned website.
We don’t store anyone’s financial or personal information on the site. There is no Electroneum stored on the site or access to Electroneum. I would imagine that the main point of this attack is to either take our site down, or gain access to our user’s usernames and passwords. I’ve been very proactive in reminding users that they must not use the same or similar details on multiple accounts across the web. I’ve followed this up again last week with a post on the front page of the site, reminding users how important it is to have protected themselves from this type of activity and that if anyone has made this mistake, to take action immediately to rectify the situation.
We’ve got plenty of measures in place to ensure this doesn’t become an issue, by preventing the site from being compromised. However, nothing is ever 100% secure, so if we can take proactive actions to nullify the chance of anyone being in any danger if the site ever were to be compromised I think that is the right thing to do regards our responsibility to our community.
When I started the site, being attacked was quite far from my mind. I thought, who would even want to target a wee site like mine. We started having a problem in the first week with users duplicating accounts, using spoofing, using instances from cloud providers, it was an actual nightmare! I’m sitting there and I’m thinking, There’s no way I can run these draws like this. It simply isn’t fair to the honest users we have. I sat for quite a while trying to think of a way that I could prevent this type of action, in a soft touch kind of way. I ended up spending more time analyzing traffic and basically ended up on a wild goose chase.
That’s why our photo verification system had to be put in place, at great pain to me. I knew it would drop our user numbers like a brick and it did. We went from around 90 odd users for our first week, right down to around 14. I thought that was really going to be the nail in the coffin for the site, however, I have a massive thanks to give to our loyal users who stuck around from the start and gave me a chance. The most heart touching thing to me about the site is that those loyal users are still with us! I really appreciate those folk.
Anyway, I plowed on with photo verification and came up with the idea that I could allow users to invalidate their photo for use on other systems, which I think did help to reassure people. I’ve no doubt it has hindered our growth, but that’s the price we pay for keeping the draws fair and I’m willing to pay that price. So, back on topic, during that period, I increased the security on the site and have continued to improve it since then. I have actually been looking into yoti integrations, as they do provide login in service along with some other cool services but I’ll have to spend some time really looking at that before I decide on what to do.
My main aim for the site is to provide a similar service to the mobile miner in terms of providing free etn to interest and retain Electroneum users, Obviously, the coins for the mobile miner will be exhausted at some point so having something that provides a very similar service as the miner, but with the pool of coins being distributed actually growing rather than shrinking. In the future, there are opportunities to increase revenue through direct advertising on the site for a business that accepts etn to users who have etn. What we have to do is increase the user numbers dramatically which in turn will increase our revenue and the amount of Electroneum we can deliver for free.
Thanks for using the service Aironeuos, It helps to support and grow the free side of the site
Chris.