Duc Tran, and why the face is covered

I have been publishing product reviews since 2018. The desk covers three areas that have almost nothing in common except the thing that makes them worth reviewing: the advertised number and the real number are different, and finding the gap takes time nobody has.

Before this I spent six years in operations at a payments company, which is where the habit came from. I spent a lot of that time reading fee schedules and reconciling what was charged against what was quoted. It turns out that is most of what a good product review is.

The rule I work to is simple and occasionally expensive: buy the thing, use it long enough to reach a billing cycle, deliberately break something, then write down what happened. Every review here states how long I tested, how I got access and what it cost me. When the answer is 'the vendor paid for this', it says that at the top of the page.

I publish under a pen name and my face is redacted in photographs. That is a deliberate choice for someone who writes critically about banks and lenders in the market they operate in. It is not anonymity from the people who matter: my legal identity, business registration and tax documentation go to every network's compliance team under NDA before a single link goes live.