[24746] in Cypherpunks
Re: Anonymous payment scheme
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul J. Ste. Marie)
Tue Jan 3 20:56:21 1995
Date: Tue, 3 Jan 95 20:40:41 EST
To: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>, cypherpunks@toad.com
From: pstemari@erinet.com (Paul J. Ste. Marie)
At 09:45 AM 1/3/95 -0800, Hal wrote:
> ... I used my VISA yesterday, and after swiping it through the now-ubiquitous
>card readers the vendor was required by the machine to manually enter the
>last four digits on the card. He complained that this was something new
>and was happening very frequently now (maybe a change with 1995?). I
>have heard of fraud where people make fake VISA cards (or steal them) and
>re-program the mag stripe to have a different number than what is on the
>front. Maybe this is a countermeasure for that. It doesn't sound like a
>blank card is the direction the industry is going. Does anyone have more
>info on this change?
I've heard of that, but I thought it was only a redundancy check to check
for read errors in the swiping process.
--Paul J. Ste. Marie
pstemari@well.sf.ca.us, pstemari@erinet.com
