I remember seeing this on pawn stars. They said the purpose was to stop black market flows of US dollars into foreign countries. I think it was particularly prevalent in Korea and Vietnam.
What they didn’t talk about is what you would do with your stack of certificates when your tour was up and it was time to go home.
Edit: They were convertible to local currency when on leave and US dollars when returning home.
After making a slightly snide comment, I decided I had to redeem myself by actually finding the answer. It’s surprisingly difficult, but the engraver was likely Charles A Brooks. I cannot determine the name or subject of the engraving itself though, though I’m merely using google searching. The answer is probably sitting in some record books in some archive somewhere.
His engravings were nearly photorealistic, so a reverse image search from a cropped pic of just the portrait may yield something–his original source potentially.
Is your address tied directly to the virtual card? If it is, terrible idea on the CC company’s part. If it’s not, how did they know it? I’d assume they have a lot more than just the virtual card info.
To my knowledge its not, it was an apple card too which would be a mountain size leak for a large group. Im thinking it was most likely an online vendor for the moment.
Is the virtual card number single use? I’ve never used one before. If not, maybe another site it was used on just leaked it along with the shipping address. Edit: Oh, that’s basically what you assumed. I tend to reply before I read more than one sentence :)
Credit Card Numbers by themselves are technically worthless because you have no guarantee they aren’t just randomly generated.
Verified Credit Cards are worth significantly more on the black market. There is no reason to set off fraud detection by using a fake address. Those resellers do not want the goods - they want good credit card numbers.
Significantly less risk in reselling numbers compared to goods and no logistics, or fencing, to speak of.
But sending the goods to the actual cardholder informs them of the fraudulent use, pretty much ensuring they deactivate the card number. Talk about burning the bridge you’re standing on…
There are a significant number of people who won’t put it together, and call the bank.
The person who’s name is on the card - might not even have access to cancel the card. My mother’s identity was stolen like this - they opened many many credit cards, and she got a lot of absolute garbage in the mail for months. There was no one for her to call. She didn’t open them.
She locked her identify but it means about fuck all cause people kept opening cards anyways.
I believe sometimes bad actors will purchase goods from themselves using illegally obtained payment information and then actually send the goods to the victim to try to argue against the chargeback and/or make the victim think “hmm maybe I did order this…”. Or they could be trying to make their devices less likely to trip fraud detection systems for a larger haul. Not sure how well this all works though. With more expensive things (phones, TVs, etc.) I’d think they’re planning on swiping the package before you get it, but with coffee I’d be shocked if that was the plan.
Planning on swiping the package requires you to be local to the victim, and willing to assume a high level of risk and time - this is not often close to the truth. These people are often not even within the United State.
What you are describing exists but it would be far more likely that you would know them - and it’s a sloppy drunk family member/friend/coworker. They would not be in the game for long doing this.
The only apps are really care about are the ones that were created before or during the great redded debacle. Anything coming out months later, especially ones that charge money. Yeah no. You weren’t here when this began. You’re just coming in after everything’s already been cleaned up. No I’m not saying that people shouldn’t develop apps. They can do that if they want but there’s really no reason to switch when something is already working and it’s been working fine for months.
I think you don’t have in mind that it takes time to develop an app. Some people do it in only their free time so it takes even longer. I think some apps started being developed during the reddit blackouts.
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