Messiah's Credit Card Scam

SteynOnline ^ | 10/24/08 | Mark Steyn

[Chairman of the Bard]

Della's street [Mark Steyn]

I mentioned earlier that "Della Ware" of "12345 No Way" had managed to make a campaign donation to the fraud-friendly Obama website but not to the McCain site, and that the Obama money was whisked out of her account and into Barack's swollen coffers moments later. "Della" - real name Erika - emailed The New York Times and managed to persuade them to cover the story, if only on their blog. We'll see if the news is fit to print tomorrow morning. The headline is unusually robust - "Obama's Online Site Accepts More Fakes" - although the story continues:

To be fair to the Obama campaign, officials there have said much of their checking for fraud occurs after the transactions have already occurred. When they find something wrong, they then refund the amount.

If they'd really wanted "to be fair", the Times would have pointed out that, in order to accept donations from "Della Ware" and "Saddam Hussein" et al, the Obama website had, intentionally, to disable all the default security settings on their credit-card processing. I took a look at the inner sanctum of my (alas, far more modest) online retail operation this afternoon and, in order to permit fraud as easy as that which the Obama campaign is facilitating, you have to uncheck every single box on the AVS system, each one of which makes it very explicit just what you're doing - ie, accepting transactions with no "billing address", no "street address" match, no "zip code" match, with a bank "of non-US origin" (I've got nothing against those, but a US campaign fundraiser surely should be wary), etc. When you've disabled the whole lot one step at a time, then you've got a system tailor-made for fake names and bogus addresses.

continue....

[widdle_wabbit]

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

[Chairman of the Bard]

That perfect!

Maybe the hammer & sickle in the upper left corner.