Why is credit card information becoming less important for hackers to steal than your biometric data, your behavioral data, and other data about you?
In order to answer this, I want to go back back back into the history of credit cards.
One of the reasons why credit cards have a lot of these raised numbers was because of the way that technology didn’t work in the past, and the way that they were trying to prevent fraud. And most likely these raised numbers will gradually disappear.
Today when you use your credit card you’ll get denied if you’re maxed out. And often the credit card company can detect if it’s fraud.
Back then they didn’t really have the connectivity to figure out instantaneously if something was maxed out or if it was fraud.
Just to spell that out, POS systems and registers back then weren’t connected to the internet necessarily so they couldn’t run information through that quickly. So they had to figure out an analog way of verifying your information and preventing fraud.
So sometimes if your purchase was over a certain amount, they would call the credit card company and they would say, “Hey, does this person actually have this much money on their credit card?” or they might even have the phone over to the customer to talk to them.
Another thing that merchants sometimes used was this really thick book with thin pages, kind of like a Yellow Pages or White Pages back in the day, but it was just a big book of fraudulent and or invalid credit card numbers.
Tens of thousands of credit card numbers in this book and the merchants would look at your card and see if your number was in that book, and if it wasn’t then they would say cool you can use you credit card.
That book went to different merchants only maybe once every month. So you can imagine there was lots of gap between it being published and sent out where there might be more numbers that need to go in there so they’re just start appearing in that book.
And mind you, because everything is a paper trail there’s so much room there for possible fraud. so one could potentially use a credit card for a while before all of that paper trail got left.
So here you are staying at the register and they’ve called your credit card company, you might even have talked to your credit card company, and they’ve also looked your number up to see if it’s in a book and it’s not there. So then they say okay we can run this transaction.
So the register person would pull out the set up above. One item was a small packet of paper that has carbon sheets between it so that you could write or imprint in triplicate on it. The other item was something called an imprint machine, or a zip zap, or a knuckle buster. And then of course your credit card that you’re trying to use.
The merchant would take the customer’s credit card, put it in the zip zap, knuckle buster, you’ll see why it’s called that, place the packet of papers on there and then a roller prints on there to create copies. That rolling motion of the imprinter took advantage of those embossed numbers and would rub the carbon to create those triplicate copies on the receipts.
You get one receipt, they get one receipt, and the merchant gets one receipt in the mail.
Today you don’t even really need the physical card to make a transaction. The physical credit card itself is becoming obsolete.
So now I go back to answering the question of why would a hacker be more interested in your biometrics for your behavioral information than your credit card, and I think you can probably guess now.
As we move into completely digital and our credit card physically isn’t that important, now we access our credit cards on our phones or on devices with biometrics or using algorithms that calculate behaviors.
To Be Continued.
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