Let me make one thing clear: I do not think that Obama’s internet team is more incompetant than an high school Intro to Web Commerce class. Therefore, since their site would not survive 20 second of even the most cursorary ethical hack test on their credit card use, it can only be because it has been a deliberate effort to permit massive credit card fraud and violate election laws wholesale. The site accepts a valid credit card number, then does not validate it against anything else entered! And has been in this state for months. This is the only credit card accepting site I have seen in the last 12 years that has this complete lack of control. Just read the updates here to see how ludicrous this is.
As such, it should be incumbent on the Federal Election Commission to demand a full data dump of all contribution (including sub-$200 amounts) made to the Obama campaign and to put it through the following basic analysis (this wouldn’t take a week; this is the type of stuff I do):
- The total amount by credit card number
- The total amount per address, as based on the valid addresses of credit cards (from the credit card services)
- The amount where there are multiple mismatches of address per card (name, street and city mismatching would be a start).
- The number of donations whose client was a foreign IP address
- Track down the purchase locations of gift cards used and how many are foreign.
This would be only a start, but it would prove quite illuminating; trust me. If they find what I suspect, they should immediately notify the Obama campaign- and the general public- that there are serious problems- the general size of the problem (most likely deep in the 8 digit range) and that matching fines will be forthcoming.
If these are the ethical considerations of his campaign, do you really think his administration would be any better?
UPDATE: I just realized something (it’s been awhile since I wrote credit card code); I don’t believe any standard automated service would accept simply the unverified credit card number. They either are doing it in collusion with a credit card processor willing to accept a high rate of fraud, or they are manually re-entering the card number and amount as you would do in your neighborhood sandwich shop. Either way, there is extra work that actually has gone on to perpetrate the fraud.
The other issue to understand in this is the vendor’s involvement, because that is a very suspicious arrangement. They very likely are taking in excessive number of bogus charges. They have to make good on the ones on which a customer complains, but the question is; is the company getting reimbursed from the Obama campaign or essentially making a multi-million dollar illegal contribution by eating it and serving as a money launderer for one of Obama’s billionare friends? And bogus ones not caught by the credit card holders, or reported (or addressed after the election) don’t enter into the picture. One wonders how clear is the charge showing up on the bills; Many internet purchases end up as pretty arcane entries on statements. Lots of questions, very few answers, and very little time to find them.
Filed under: Barack Obama, Democrats, Election 2008, Politics
Mike,
Wrong about the collusion. Get an authorize.net account, you can go in and turn off all the various security features. don’t do AVS, don’t concern yourself with a CVV, it’s all the right of the merchant to make those calls and be culpable in the event of fraud.
So yeah, no need for collusion. Could potentially even be excused as stupidity, depending on the default settings of whatever merchant provider they’re using.
Still, it’s entirely inappropriate.
-Josh
Correct, Josh; it could all be turned off by the ‘merchant. Takes a specific effort to do so. But the Obama campaign has contracted for Net services and that is the person in charge of the site; the collusion to eat bouncebacks could be through them, if it is occurring. Most assuredly, the returns exceed the amount being paid for Web services, so such a vendor, eating fraudulent charges and not seeking reimbursement from the Obama campaign, would be making a multi-million dollar contribution under the table, then writing it off as ‘business losses’..
I’ll present the facts first, then my credentials at the end
Credit card company collusion is NOT required for Barak to accept manifestly fraudulent contributions. Remember, the credit card companies are not the FEC and do not have the same rules. Legitimately, the credit card companies must support many different valid use cases that you and I may not consider right away.
That is NOT to say that cc processing rules will not eventually catch up with him and get some of his operations shut down. They probably will… but not until after the election.
The credit card companies have 1 primary metric they use to determine if a merchant (a campaign accepting card contributions is a ‘merchant’ in this case) is accepting too many fraudulent charges: that is the ‘charge-back rate’ – the rate that cardholders are disputing the charges on their card statements. Generally, the ‘alarm’ threshold is 5% as expressed in total revenues.
Since cardholders have 60 days to report a fraudulent charge, Obama revenue managers probably figure they have until after the election before charge-backs become a real problem. They can partially remedy this liability in the credit card companies’ view by publishing a ‘no questions asked’ refund policy and by being quick to offer a refund where warranted.
They are certainly paying about ½ to 1% more in processing fees for accepting the risky transactions where neither the 3-4 digit code nor billing zip are checked, but what’s $10,000 out of every $million? Chump change.
But with $500 million on the line, Obama’s managers would be silly to simply rely on one merchant account for their revenues – surely they have several under different entity names, so if one merchant account gets shut down for abuse, they simply switch to another with what would amount to changing less than 1 line of code in their card processing software. If they are smart, they already have the required changes in their software ‘on standby’ for quick changes.
Remember, the credit card companies have made about $10 million processing Obama’s contributions so far, and they make the same amount on a refund that they did on the original charge too. Either way, the credit card companies win.
And if you think the RNC are wussies for the way they retreat whenever a liberal starts to hyperventilate, you haven’t met the credit card companies yet. They are not interested at all in the headlines (RAAAACIST) they would get if they shut down one of more of his merchant accounts for fraud.
It’s probably safe to assume that there have been a few ‘difficult’ conference calls among Obama’s revenue managers and the credit card company security departments, but the Obamanagers can probably brazen these out for the present. And credit card company security departments CAN be overruled by higher executives.
I have worked in the ecommerce biz for 15 years providing shopping cart and ecommerce payment services to over 10,00 merchants on the net: http://www.800cart.com – our firm is PCI DSS certified.
Ron Robinson
http://www.800cart.com
Hah. You guys are a laugh. Grasping at straws.
If anyone could take out Obama with this story, it would have been done. The Swiftboat guy would have done it in a heartbeat (provided he was paid, like he was in 2004).
There’s PLENTY of Obama haters out there with the money and connections to expose this.
If it hasn’t been done, it’s because there’s no fraud and no “collusion.” Same with Obama’s birth certificate.
Of course, you morons are free to FILE A LAWSUIT all on your own, and pay big bucks to some shyster lawyer with dollar signs in his eyes who sees SUCKER written all over your pathetic faces.
I make less than Joe The Plumber REALLY makes and I just send $50 to Obama.
Hope y’all grind your yellow McCain teeth down to the bone.
..
Ron: and what if the credit card company simply dropped the fraudulent amounts immediately to bad debt immediately after the election. They would write that off as an expense and have made a 7 digit contribution to the winning candidate, who is in a position to pay them back out of the $700 billion bailout kitty. A bit of creative accounting involved, but I’ve seen far worse.
Seriously, JMarra is right. This claim of Obama taking these fake credit cards is a totally political smokescreen that you’re wasting your time on. If John McCain’s personal attack-dog 527 groups couldn’t put a subtantial hole in the Obama campaign, how do you suppose you guys will? Obama for ’08
Good read, thanks. Always looking out for weird and wonderful stuff to read :)
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