Whose Trust Is It?

The folks at Trust Who recently completed an interesting analysis of some of their transactions, curious to know if PayPal account status was a driver in determining fraud.

What they found, which did not surprise us, is that PayPal account status provided no significant fraud signal. What curbed fraud most was performing customer verifications, which I assume to mean credit card verifications (AVS, CID, geo-location, etc.).

This is not surprising because PayPal's account status features serve primarily PayPal. Every means of understanding trust online must be consumed in the context of who that means of trust primarily serves.

eBay's feedback system is another good example of this. You'd be hard-pressed to argue against the assertion that their system serves eBay first, power-sellers second, general sellers third, and buyers fourth.

Trust online needs to be measured and mediated by an independent third party, just as the folks at FairIsaac provide the industry-standard FICO credit scores and Consumer Reports provides its trusted independent product reviews.