Whacky Credit Cards and Decline Messages

[Cyclopath]

Lately I've been seeing a lot more people with blatantly stolen credit cards (like the ones that try and buy a bunch of gift cards with what is supposedly their "mother's card" or their "husband's card" with the last names not even close to matching), and decline messages like "CALL OPERATOR" and "PICK UP CARD" (I do know what these message mean). Seems like it must be a result of the bad economy. Has anyone else here run into anything interesting while cashiering, or had anything interesting happen when trying to use a stolen credit card? I know, from his bio, that RBCP apparently got popped at a travel agency once using a stolen card, and I also know he used to work at 7/11 and probably saw a lot of this kind of stuff there.

[nyphonejacks]

i thought you could not buy gift cards, prepaid credit cards or prepaid cell phone cards with a credit card at the store... at least that is what i have always been told when i try to legitimately pay for these purchases with a credit card... (well the prepaid cellphone card at least, since i do not use the other 2)

[Cyclopath]

i thought you could not buy gift cards, prepaid credit cards or prepaid cell phone cards with a credit card at the store... at least that is what i have always been told when i try to legitimately pay for these purchases with a credit card... (well the prepaid cellphone card at least, since i do not use the other 2)

It probably depends on the individual store's policies. You can do it at Winn-Dixie.

[rbcp]

All my cashier jobs were in the 90's, so I didn't see a single bit of credit card fraud by other people.  Debit cards hadn't really caught on back then and I don't even know if they had debit card Visa and Mastercard yet.  I don't think there was a ton of ATM skimming fraud back then like there is today because the technology to capture cards wasn't as easy to come by.

And nice try, trying to get us to admit that we use stolen cards, fed!

[Cyclopath]

The 90's... the days when you could go pretty much anywhere and find not just a payphone, but more than one payphone. The days of dial-up modems. The days when video games were all 2D, until the late 90s when 3D games were first coming out. The days before flash drives, when floppies and CD-ROMs (not Rs and RWs) were the primary external storage devices for computers. The days when movies were on VHS tapes and music was on cassette tapes. The days before flat panel TVs and computer montiors. The days when cell phones were analog. The days of MS DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0, and Windows 98. The days that I remember and the 14 year olds you see yacking on some parts of the internet don't, yet some of them still think they're 1337. Wow have the times changed over the past few years. Makes you wonder what the world will be like twenty years from now.

[nyphonejacks]

i see everything except the denial of being a phed...

[Cyclopath]

I'm from the Federal Tracing The Phone Losers and Brad Carter Commission... not.

[ApprenticePhreak]

Has to be a fed.

But to the point of the topic brought up many moons ago, when I was working at 7-11 for a short stint last year, I once swiped a card from our local druggy. This guy was amazing. Eyes were never not red, always smelled like filth, had a bottle of bourbon hanging out of his White Sox jacket, and just looked like he was rolled in a vat of grease for eight hours every night while he slept.

Oh. He also had a bad habit of asking if anyone of us who worked the night shift had needles he could use.

Regardless. Ol' Billy boy here came in one night smelling as bad as ever with a brand new shiny credit card. Y'know, the sort that have the face of the owner on it. Whatever the black dude's name was, I'm sure it wasn't Julie Stance, nor was he a white woman with what looked to be the ugliest weave known to man.

Didn't care. Swiped the card. The machine told me to "HOLD CARD" and I just didn't feel like doing that. Cleared, swiped again, cleared, swiped again. No go. Had to tell the druggy his card wasn't going to work. He flipped out, screaming and yelling, knocked over our sun glasses display and hobbled out.

Seriously. I'm not going to fucking hold a card from anyone. Had to pick those glasses back up after he left. 

[murd0c]

I'll never forget a guy coming into the pet store I worked in on Long Island. I rang him up about $2500 worth of crap. (About all the large stock we had in the store.) And then produced a single, mangled up check and wrote it out and gave me an ID from Georgia that was clearly not him.

He started to get a little freaked out when I got on the phone to verify the check, which is what we had to on every check we would get. (It wasn't many, he was the first customer I had to call and verify for). He told me that since the GA license he gave me was expired, he can run back to his car to get his current New York one.

He never came back, check came back as being a closed account due to fraud. Big surprise. I didn't have to put all the shit back on the shelf, though.

[Cyclopath]

Well, we can ignore CALL OPERATOR, but we can't ignore PICK UP CARD where I work because it freezes up the register and demands a supervisor's key. I almost always catch card fraud before it happens and either page for a supervisor or tell the person to eat shit and die, depending on my mood at the time, before the card's even run. It really doesn't happen that often, but it does happen, and back in December, January, and February it was happening right and left.

Seriously though, I can't see why anyone would NOT want to hold the card because the card companies offer a reward for sending the cards back to them, unless you have an idiot of a manager that just throws the card away instead of sending it back. That's why if I was in a convenience store or somewhere else small like that I would have just called the auth center myself, screw the managers. (hint hint, if you own or manage a business that processes credit cards, you could probably get an assload of those prepaid Visa cards and report them as stolen, and run one of those cards about once or twice a month to collect the reward, it'd be kind of like the old AT&T cash).

Speaking of checks, they're a pain in the ass, or at least they were at Toys R Us where every other check said AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED. Haven't those n00bs heard of a debit card?