I have been selling retail technology (point of sale) for 30 years, and I too know a little about AVS.
Plain and simple, what they are doing is immoral, if not illegal. And the qeustion “who is their credit switch” is a very interesting question. All transacations ultimately end up at a payment processor (FirstData, 5/3 Bank, etc.) that clears the transaction.
The poster above is right about the transaction fee. So it appears that the BHO campaign in not concerned about paying the higher fees (because they are not collecting name, zip, etc.). Now why would that be? On a $600M campaign, the cost of that 1% extra transaction fee could mean an extra $6,000,000, which would be enough for several more ads. So I have a conspiracy theory.
If a large % of these transactions are from stolen identity (that’s why they are using fake names), then that means that a good part of his $600M are fraudulent and illegal transactions. That means the average Joes across America will see a fraudulent transaction on their credit card bill. So even if it is at the $86 average per BHO donation, with 1 million people you can easily get $86,000,000 in just a few seconds!
If the feds can trace the money flow on this issue alone, BHO should be shot by firing squad for treason.
Federal campaign finance law imposes individual contribution limits, bans corporate contributions, and has reporting requirements by individual for each election.
These rules depend on collection of the identity of the donor, and then reporting each contribution and the total contributions from each individual donor.
Obama is obviously flagrantly violating those laws.
Exactly. They can’t claim this is an innocent mistake; this was brought to their attention LAST WEEK, if not earlier, and they have not turned AVS back on on their website as of this week. They say they’re relying on “back-end checking”...why do that when you’ve got a reliable, simple, automatic system, used by millions of other online merchants, THAT SAVES YOU MONEY IN THE PROCESS?
Like Scythian said, there’s no legitimate reason for an online merchant to go with AVS turned off. I can’t think of one. It lowers the chances of fraud, it saves money in transaction fees, it has an extremely low rate of errors. So why not use it? None of the answers to that question are very good.
The WaPo has run two fairly weak articles on this. That’s it. NOBODY in the DBM is hitting The One on this. The only people who are keeping it front and center are the conservative alternative media, mainly blogs.
}:-)4
Another likely possibility is that it allows anyone in the world to use as many of those temporary/disposable charge card #s as they desire to funnel contributions. You can buy those “charge” cards all over the place now and they are untraceable if fake name and address info are used in the online transaction, I would think. By having AVS turned off the Obamanation lets people like the Soros team know that they can funnel unlimited numbers of “small” donor contributions into the Obama campaign.