Square working on 'a credit processing and risk issue' before shipping more card readers
By Chris Ziegler 
posted June 19th 2010 10:23AM
posted June 19th 2010 10:23AM
"Dear Square user,
We announced Square with the phrase: "0 to $60 in under 10 seconds."
Square's goal is to enable people to accept payments immediately, everywhere. We realize the amount of time we've taken to ship our Square readers has been frustrating, sometimes confusing, and has generated a number of questions. When we announced the company last December, we estimated Square would be ready in the U.S. sometime in early 2010. Since then, we've let our excitement get the best of us and have released parts of Square before they were fully baked.
A recent email from our support team to a Square user sums up where we are:
Until recently, we were facing a big hardware shortage, but that is now resolved (we sent our co-founder Jim to China for a couple weeks to arrange better manufacturing, and that did the trick). The problem has transitioned to something we've been working on simultaneously, a credit processing and risk issue. We need to strengthen our underwriting infrastructure so that we can handle the huge demand for readers and still manage the risk of chargebacks and fraud. This is the last thing preventing us from shipping readers as fast as we'd like, and we have pretty much the entire team working on it.
The way we are handling the risk of chargebacks and fraud is through transaction limits, but we have received feedback that those limits are too low. We are rethinking and expanding our underwriting infrastructure to address this issue. As soon as we finish, we will send you an email to confirm that you would like us to run a credit check (or you can cancel your request to process cards with Square which will securely remove your personal information). We will then ship your free card reader and activate your account to accept card payments.
We thank you for your continued patience as we work to deliver a utility you can use every day and for allowing us the time to get it right.
Jack Dorsey
Square CEO"
@Apollostar Ipod touch head phone jack is bottom right. I should know using one to post this reply. Not sure why the picture is of a touch as there's no 3g so no mobilty..
@Apollostar Ipod touch.
@Apollostar
its an ipd touch. the audio jack is at the bottom.
Great more stuff at Square to go wrong
@VincentLaw
You have got a good point there..........
Doesn't the iPod Touch have the jack at the bottom? So your credit card info will now be sent over unsecured, probably hackable, wifi.
This idea seems like a good idea on paper, but just not practical in real life IMO.
@greg787 Dont worry google already has your wifi info secure... Zing!
Great...Another skimming device...
I see a big lawsuit in the future between Square and SquareEnix.
God a card reader on a jail broken phone... Wonder how log it will take someone to write a app to harvest the details.
Never would I let some person take my credit card and *swipe the information to his phone*. Can you imagine yourself telling the person who's buying your old whatever "k, now give me your credit card so I can swipe the information to my phone for the purchase to go through."
It honestly sounds like a security breach everyway. What's to stop people from just running away with the credit card, how about modding and bypassing the installed security the phone to pick up valuable information?
Horrible idea.
@n11 : Do you know what comes out of the back of a normal credit card terminal? A PHONE CORD.
@radarskiy Never had many problems with those in the past (except for the sometimes obvious skimmer placed overtop), nor have we had many problems with making credit card purchases at the store or online. The phone is much more hackable and at your disposable.
But hey use it at your own risk.
Have they taken down the App from the Android Market? I can't seem to find it. Even when I scan the barcode my phone says it cannot be found in the market. (Nexus One)
I don't get what Square has to add in this market space.
Decent software? Okay, that's fine.
But otherwise, I don't see why going through Square to clear credit cards would be more (or even as) cost effective as going straight to the CC companies directly. They want to repackage what the CC companies offer? Okay. They bundle the risk (and pay for it in different ways?) okay. But they still can't make it go away. And since it's just a pricing game, if they take off the CC companies will just jump in with the same packages.
Did anyone actually get one of these yet? I requested one like a month ago...but I was wondering how long it takes for them to credit your bank account
I'm building something just like this for our mobile pos display... Tiny atom mini-pc by acer, USB msr from Dell, & a USB 3G dongle. The pc runs ubuntu+apache & I wrote a webpage that reads a swipe & does Ajax call to my authorize.net account. The only difference is the presentation.
I'd like to see a USB cable from a phone to a hub that can get a msr & a barcode scanner...
I'm shocked, SHOCKED to find out that accepting payments isn't as easy as throwing a dongle on an ipod.
When Mastercard starts to accept Bumps that will be the end of this company.
Anyone else think going though the headphone jack isn't really a safeway to do this? like Whats stoping someone form plugging in a serial cable and implanting Credit card info into their system?
@mastassmasta If you have Chase then you have nothing to worry about :)
Some of their job requirements are "good haircut" and "a mohawk" for their software engineers.
Add a pin unique to the users credit card profile and don't allow charges without the pin, like chip and pin in the EU?