Alex Riddle

I help people sell guns online | 🇺🇸 | Tweeting about development, marketing, and travel. 🇻🇦

[Alex Riddle @AlexDRiddle]

Got a divorce lawyer 788 leads using TikTok, $5.51 per lead. 1/7 converted into cases.

[Alex Riddle @AlexDRiddle]

Couple thoughts on this as someone who deals with fraud in the firearms space nearly day from the software side.

1. The likelihood of an FFL item being fraudulent is so incredibly low. It requires a transfer at an FFL. You can tell the transferring FFL to verify their ID against the billing address, if you really want. Out of tens of thousands of orders last year that went through our system, I think across my clients we had 3 firearms that resulted in a fraudulent chargeback. You do not want to build fraud protection around these edge cases - the number of orders you lose will vastly outweight the benefit here. @patio11 said it best - the optimal amount of fraud is not zero.

2. Most of the reasons you would flag an order for potential fraud can be determined at the moment the order is placed. Sending a text a week after the order is placed with a link is just bad practice - if you want to flag it, do it right there on the order confirmation screen and collect the info there. Looks less scammy this way.

3. Customers with successful order history should weigh into how you determine your fraud score, as the likelihood is incredibly low here as well. It's not zero, but give them a pass unless you see something really egregious.

4. There are significantly better ways to screen orders than Intellicheck, and are less invasive. Many will even "insure" the order if there is a chargeback or fraud!

[Rank 1 Apples @Rank1Apples]

Well, I will no longer be doing business with @palmettoarmory which is a shame because I really liked them.

Ive debated back and forth about posting my experience because it leaves me at risk of doxxing myself since I'm sure they'll be able to tie this to my account in about 2 seconds, if they actually do some digging as I dont know how many people are upset about this, but I decided to post after another friend told me about having the same experience as well.

This started because a few days ago I got what I thought was a weird text asking me to do an ID verify for an order I made last week with a 3rd party company called Intellicheck for an order that I made.

After clicking the link Intellicheck wanted me to give them access to my phone camera, files, and ID. When I called to ask about this I was told its for fraud prevention and its a new system.

While this seems reasonable on the surface, and I could understand it for new customers or mismatched billing and shipping for high dollar random items, that is just not the case here. I am a returning customer, buying guns, which are shipping to a Palmetto approved FFL, where I then have to show ID and fill out a 4473, with a credit card I've already used for multiple purchases for guns with them, with the same matching billing address. To ask me to ID verify again with a 3rd party company is complete nonsense. Also, before you say this is about fraud, Palmetto has continued to process and ship other orders to me since then, that I didn't cancel, using the exact same billing address, shipping address, and credit card. So if it was about fraud, they would have canceled all my pending orders, but they haven't, they're still fulfilling other open orders.

You may think I'm overreacting, and oh jeez just comply it's not a big deal, but for a company that goes on and on about support of freedom, and the 2nd amendment, and all the stuff they're doing for Virginians before the ban, this is a really tone deaf move to ask your customers to ID verify with a 3rd party company. I offered to ID verify directly with Palmetto and was told they aren't doing that and that this is their new policy.

I was of course assured by the customer service rep that this third party company was totally "safe and secure" but they are always "safe and secure" until the next data breach that they ALWAYS have, where you then find out that all the data that they promised wasn't saved of course was saved and oh jeez sorry go f yourself to bad so sad nothing you can do. These companies constantly have breaches and mismanage our data. This allows Palmetto to push the liability for a breach off on a 3rd party.

We must push back against the utilization of these 3rd party companies. It is no better than the government using Flock or the Data Mining Companies as a loophole to violate the 4th amendment, and for Palmetto to stoop to the same level as the government overreach that they rail against and make videos condemning is shockingly disappointing. These companies are never secure, they're never safe, they never destroy your data, and for Palmetto to get on board with financially supporting them building more of a digital surveillance apparatus against all of us is just something I cant abide by.

I don't really expect anything to come of this, and losing me as a customer isnt going to cost them anything that they'll ever notice, and even the other people who feel the same as me probably aren't going to cost them enough money to notice because most people won't care about this and I'll be painted as unreasonable, but I just want people to know that this is what they're doing now. I'm disappointed, I liked them and their deals, and I really wanted this rifle that I had been waiting for a while for them to go on big sale again, which I'll now miss out on, guess thats just the cost of not wanting to do this nonsense. If it was really about fraud, they wouldnt be processing my other orders with the same credit card.

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

I demand infinite digital storage, for free, forever, but also if you build a data center within a thousand miles of me I will start a jihad

[Alex Riddle @AlexDRiddle]

@RobertJBye Would love to, but can't seem to get past this.

[Aiden Bai @aidenybai]

im fully convinced agent skills are just astrology for vibe coders

[Nick Watts 🇺🇸 @NickWatts]

This is like when pickleball was invented and pickleballers were going up to tennis players saying “You play tennis? No way! I just got in to pickleball! Pretty much the same!”

That’s how I feel watching weekend drinkers struggle to eat 9 lil smokies and a coors light tallboy

[Tim Ross @TimRossOH]

The common theme? Ohioans.

[Deva Hazarika @devahaz]

TLDR:

1: all the accusations made against us were totally false
2: we are making product and company changes to address each of the totally false allegations
3: we will not be taking any questions at this time

[Alex Riddle @AlexDRiddle]

I know where I’m sourcing my RAM from.

[Midnight Capital @Midnight_Captl]

Slide from the head of Waymo compute today

Their compute is now under the trunk. It’s liquid cooled & hardened to withstand extreme weather conditions (>115 degrees in Phoenix, -30 degrees in Minneapolis)

Pretty cool work by $GOOG

[Nick Fink @finkn23]

He is wrong. Not everyone wants to go to a big college. Many of the smaller schools in Ohio focus on things that big schools don’t. Having options is good. Entire towns economies are based on being a college town. It’s an absolutely ridiculous thing to say in this state

[Alex Riddle @AlexDRiddle]

Soon.

[Michael Ron Bowling @mrbcyber]

The Chinese government is now blocking antimony, used in hardening alloys, to western democracies. An antimony mine in Canada was purchased by Chinese interests in 2009 and shut down in 2023.

This was all part of a plan by the CCP to destroy western defense manufacturing.

[Alex Riddle @AlexDRiddle]

Unfortunately Claude Code /remote-control still has a ways to go. Just tons of issues staying connected or being able to do approvals on the go.

Still much better for my workflow at least to SSH into my staging server from my phone with @TermiusHQ and run things there.

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

DoW realized they only have 6 months left on their Claude of War subscription and decided to immediately get to work in order to make the most of it

[jack friks @jackfriks]

switching from codex to claude code is like being able to see colour for the first time in your life

[Theo - t3.gg @theo]

Your phone doesn’t use your mic to spy on you.

Reality is much scarier: your phone infects your subconscious and influences what you talk about

[🦊🚙🦘 @foxcar_joey]

Sorry to be that guy, but there is no actual need for librarians to have a master's degree. It's just a highly desirable role and there isn't a willingness to drop the salary to a market clearing price, so additional education cost is how the market responds.

[Alex Riddle @AlexDRiddle]

You actually can. You don’t just get to use one amendment at a time.

[Kathryn Watson @kathrynw5]

TRUMP on the South Lawn: "With that being said, you know, you can't have guns. You can't walk in with guns. You just can't. You can't -- listen. You can't walk in with guns. You can't do that. But it's just a very unfortunate incident."

[National Association for Gun Rights @gunrights]

Carrying an extra magazine implies nothing.

Holsters designed to carry spare magazines are common and widely sold. Training resources and guides across the internet actively recommend it. Thousands of law-abiding Americans do this every day. This is standard, not overkill.

Claiming otherwise sets a dangerous precedent for Second Amendment rights and creates an easy backdoor argument for magazine bans and similar legislation.

[Bad Opinions Calvin’s Dad @SirBadOpinions]

“A 9mm semiautomatic weapon”

It was a pistol. They’re talking about this gun like how libs do. They’re purposely describing it like it was some sort of machine gun to make him seem like a terrorist or whatever.

[Maggie @maggiemoda]

When people die, everyone has their mind already made up. It leads to the worst cycles of political commentary and reflexive excuse making from our leaders.

[Oliver Alexander @OAlexanderDK]

The people who make these memes are the same ones now cheering for a federal agent killing a man for exercising his first and second amendment rights.