This is true for AVS and plain old ordinary credit cards. If you happen to have a bank issued credit card or if you are using a visa/mc check card, it may be different. Most banks handle the authorization as just zip and street.
PP may not be using the AVS system for checking. They may have switched to a different system in the past week, with the intention of plugging the GAPING hole in AVS. See
this for more info. You will see that AVS is not a universal thing. Be advised that there are several other options available for cc verification. Not all cards are subject to being AVS'd, so if PP used AVS and the card was a non-AVSable type, it would return as a FAIL even if everything was in fact kosher. Quite a few gift cards were non-AVSable. That's why some cards NEVER worked for stealth.
At least one of the credit cards I have goes further. The name must match. If a merchant or say PP did AVS on it, without submitting for name comparison, it would FAIL. Thus, I guarantee that this card would be unusable for stealth purposes.
Understand that when I say 'bank issued', I don't mean banking institution such as chase, citi, or boa. I mean issued from your branch or application initiated by your branch from an in-person application. These aren't the kind of cards that the average consumer would get. Not the kind you apply for by mail.
Example without being entirely specific: I go into my local branch and talk to my financial manager. We determine it wise for me to have a separate card issued for a specific type of transactions. I complete an application that is not industry standard. My manager phones in for provisioning, pulls a fresh card out of a vault, puts it in a machine which raises the letters for my name and card number etc, then encodes the card while I am standing there. The kind of card you can use to buy a car or even real estate. It has the Visa logo on it. It swipes like any other Visa. But for online transactions (and many POS transactions), it verifies the cardholder name and street address and zip and CVN on the back.
Many Discover cards do the name check too. Unless you use the VCC option of Discover.
About 1 in 10 Visa check cards and debit cards will do the name check as well. I don't know about MC or AMEX. Sorry.
Check cards are not exactly credit cards, even though they have the same logo. Most work just like a credit card. But not all. Some do get processed slightly different than the plain old stand-alone credit card us old farts are used to.
You are almost certainly correct about ebay taking the easy route and just blocking by institution prefix. For Visa and MC, the prefix is only the first 4 digits. 4128 would be citi visa, 5424 would be citi mc, for example. 6011 is Discover.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jonas  AVS only can check zip code and street number. That's all it does.
Credit cards will not release cardholder info to merchants without the cardholder being on the phone at the same time.
For blocking prepaid cards, eBay probably is blocking bank identification numbers, the 6 digits that a card starts with. I am sure there's at least a card or two that eBay forgot to block. I very much doubt it came from eBay reading this forum and more likely because it's very common knowledge to use prepaid cards to get back on eBay.
So far I am still able to pay my eBay fees with prepaid cards, though. |
