Someone who seems to have reading comprehension issues said:
Even John Levine agreed that the number ranges were known.

Known to online verification services, certainly. Available to
download into offline terminals, I wouldn't count on it.

All the MC/V gift cards I see for sale online claim that they are
accepted anywhere that MC/V debit cards are, or words to that effect.

rsig




--
Regards,
John Levine, , Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly

In message , at 08:31:52 on
Fri, 2 Mar 2012, Robert Neville remarked:
There are lots of gift cards, but to be honest I've never thought they
might be numbered like credit cards. They are branded to particular
stores or chains.

In the US, gift cards have evolved over the past few years. They used to be
issued by the store in question and may or may not have had a proprietary
account number embossed/recorded.

A few years ago, the major card issuers became aware of the market and decided
they wanted a peice of the float/lost card funds and started issuing gift cards
on behalf of the retailers. Now days, they are essentially prepaid debit cards.
Depending on the card, they can be restricted to a particular store, chain of
stores, or used anywhere a credit card is accepted.

I've just come back from ASDA, which is the UK's branch of Walmart.

They have gift cards, but only mag stripe, and neither visibly numbered
nor containing a chip-and-pin. The latter is going to raise the bar, for
gift cards masquerading as credit/debit cards, in the UK.

The literature said you could load up to £500 on them, and as far as I
could see were only redeemable at ASDA (not including some high risk
concessions). They will also give regular refunds on these gift cards,
if you ask for it rather than cash.

https://cards.asda.com/faqs

I do worry about the "Monkey Bank" brand name, after all if you pay
peanuts...
--
Roland Perry

In message , at 16:07:17 on Fri, 2 Mar
2012, John Levine remarked:
The gift cards at my supermarket are AmEx and Visa branded. More
likely there aren't enough prepaid cards in the UK for National
Rail to have noticed.

Maybe I'll send one to Roland and he can see if he can buy a train
ticket with it.

Note to casual observers: John and I have met in our day jobs, so this
may not be an idle threat.
--
Roland Perry

In message , at 08:35:46 on
Fri, 2 Mar 2012, Robert Neville remarked:
(Note to USA subscribers: for a generation, Barclaycard and VISA were
synonymous in the UK.)

I recall some of my early trips to the UK, attempting use use a Mastercard,
getting a puzzled look from the clerk and having to say "Just process it like a
Eurocard".

Hmm, not sure what a Eurocard is - the closest I recall is a cheque
guarantee card for an obsolete initiative called "Eurocheques", which
were a kind of cheque that you could write in any currency in the EU
(and long before the Euro was a currency - so we are talking about
Deutschmarks, Francs etc).

But I'm old enough to have had a Diners card, and to have found an
outlet which accepted it.
--
Roland Perry

They have gift cards, but only mag stripe, and neither visibly numbered
nor containing a chip-and-pin. The latter is going to raise the bar, for
gift cards masquerading as credit/debit cards, in the UK.

Perhaps you would enjoy a Travelex Cash Passport, a chip+pin
reloadable prepaid card. They're denominated in EUR or GBP but sold
only in the U.S. The advertising emphasizes the acceptance problems
that non-chip cards can have in Europe.

The card is "free" but the only way to load money into it is
to exchange USD at a dreadful exchange rate.

http://www.travelex.com/US/Products/Cash-Passport/

R's,
John
--
Regards,
John Levine, , Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly

On 02-Mar-12 09:09, Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 14:39:53 on Fri, 2 Mar
2012, John Levine remarked:
In all cases, the lasr number is a check digit, computed using a
secret formula known only to people who know how to type "Luhn"
into Google.

When I was working in mail order we wanted to be able to checksum card
numbers handwritten on orders, or taken over the phone. We knew there
was a checksum, but the companies refused to tell us (this was decades
before Google, naturally). So we pooled our company AMEX cards on the
table, which of course had quite a lot of digits in common, and had
cracked it in about five minutes. Then, as we suspected, the same
algorithm worked for the rest.

But to return to the original point of this exercise, to get free
train travel, buy a $20 Visa gift card for cash at the supermarket,
and use it on the train. (Do they even have gift cards in the UK? If
so, make it a 20 quid gift card.)

There are lots of gift cards, but to be honest I've never thought they
might be numbered like credit cards. They are branded to particular
stores or chains.

Store-branded gift cards have been around for a long time; some have
numbers in the 6 range, like a store-branded credit card, but most I've
seen have a barcode (using some store-specific numbering system) rather
than a magstripe.

Gift cards are very, very popular in the US. Stores love them because
they know only a small fraction get redeemed before they expire, and
customers love them because it's simpler and faster than actually
shopping before the numerous holidays that our crazy culture says we're
obligated to give people gifts.

And then there were pre-pay charge cards about five or six years ago,
which think got scrapped because they were too easy for money launderers
to move money internationally with. Their charges were a bit steep as well.

Relatively recently, Visa and AmEx* have introduced gift cards with the
usual logos, magstripe and embossed numbers as on any other US-issued
card from those networks. They are purchased for face value just like a
store-brand gift card. AFAIK, they are not refillable, which would make
them distinct from prepaid cards.

(* I've never noticed MC ones, but they may exist.)

Until you've bought $20 worth of tickets, it works normally, and the
ticket price is deducted from your balance when the transaction
clears. After that, the bank rejects the transaction, but if the
guard's ticket machine doesn't validate in real time, by the time that
happens you're long gone, and since the card is a bearer instrument,
they have no way to know who to go after. Repeat indefinitely until
the expiration date on the card.

Knowing the BIN ranges of debit cards and gift cards doesn't help
here, since many of them are entirely valid and the train company
will get paid.

The train companies already don't accept Solo and Electron[1], because
they (the train companies) don't have online verification, so they'd
just add those sorts of cards to that list.

[1] Debit cards for accounts with no overdraft facilities and/or
impoverished customers, like students, and under-18's.

The same problem could be had with an near-/over-limit credit card,
whereas one of those evil debit cards could have plenty of funds
available. It seems a rather arbitrary distinction.

S

--
Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking

On 02-Mar-12 09:19, Adam H. Kerman wrote:
John Levine wrote:
But to return to the original point of this exercise, to get free
train travel, buy a $20 Visa gift card for cash at the supermarket,
and use it on the train. (Do they even have gift cards in the UK? If
so, make it a 20 quid gift card.)

Until you've bought $20 worth of tickets, it works normally, and the
ticket price is deducted from your balance when the transaction
clears. After that, the bank rejects the transaction, but if the
guard's ticket machine doesn't validate in real time, by the time that
happens you're long gone, and since the card is a bearer instrument,
they have no way to know who to go after. Repeat indefinitely until
the expiration date on the card.

Knowing the BIN ranges of debit cards and gift cards doesn't help
here, since many of them are entirely valid and the train company
will get paid.

Stephen raised the spectre of gift cards to dispute the point I made
that card types were known by number ranges,

I only raised the "spectre" of cards with insufficient funds to accept a
transaction but which were not "closed" or "invalid". Gift cards are
merely a trivial example of that, and banning gift cards (or debit
cards) from trains does not solve the problem, if it were even possible.

so you just need the list
of known closed accounts when using a hand-held point of sale device
carried by the conductor, given that authorization won't be convenient
or possible when using these devices.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of millions of closed accounts,
and more every second. It is not feasible to store that list in credit
card terminals, and it would be out of date before it even finished
downloading! Given the rate card numbers are invalidated, it's possible
that you could _never_ finish downloading, like the old story about the
Chinese walking single-file into the sea.

Even you agree that yes, these are issued in known number ranges. If
the transaction with a gift card cannot be authorized in certain
circumstances, then don't accept it in those circumstances.

Why restrict that to gift cards, though, rather than _all_ cards?

Similarly, they're not going to accept cards issued by merchants to
give credit to their own customers for purchases at their own store,
like gasoline credit cards. The accounts are issued in different
ranges.

They should be in the 6 range, and the merchant limitation is enforced
by the issuing bank, not the merchants. The merchant just swipes the
card you present and waits a few seconds to see if it worked.


This Web page discusses payment methods that also apply to paying
on train: http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/times_...t_methods.html

Credit/Debit/Charge Cards

All National Rail train companies accept the major cards
such as Visa, Visa Delta, MasterCard, Maestro and Amex.
Some train companies also accept Diners Club International,
Solo and Electron.

Nothing on this page says that gift cards are accepted. Gosh. They
must know the card number ranges!

Why would they care if it's a gift card? A card is a card; as long as
the transaction is authorized, that's all that matters.

So many followups later, Stephen's point was a non-issue, but I won't
likely live long enough till he withdraws it.

I have no need to withdraw something that I never said; as usual, _you_
are arguing with a strawman.

S

--
Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking

On Fri, 2 Mar 2012 18:31:52 +0000, Roland Perry
wrote:

In message , at 08:35:46 on
Fri, 2 Mar 2012, Robert Neville remarked:
(Note to USA subscribers: for a generation, Barclaycard and VISA were
synonymous in the UK.)

I recall some of my early trips to the UK, attempting use use a Mastercard,
getting a puzzled look from the clerk and having to say "Just process it like a
Eurocard".

Hmm, not sure what a Eurocard is

A Brussels-based operation which in 1968 entered into an agreement
with Mastercard giving mutual recognition of either's cards :-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocar...ayment_card%29
that operation evolved into Europay which later merged with
Mastercard.

- the closest I recall is a cheque
guarantee card for an obsolete initiative called "Eurocheques",

A related operation. RIP 2002.

which
were a kind of cheque that you could write in any currency in the EU
(and long before the Euro was a currency - so we are talking about
Deutschmarks, Francs etc).

But I'm old enough to have had a Diners card, and to have found an
outlet which accepted it.

Roland Perry wrote:

Hmm, not sure what a Eurocard is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocar...ayment_card%29

In article ,
Adam H. Kerman wrote:
Stephen Sprunk wrote:

There is no way for the terminal to know whether the Visa/MC/etc. number
presented is a credit, debit or charge card. A card processor _may_ be
able to deduce it from other information, but only the issuing bank
knows for sure.

I have no idea how you come up with this stuff, but the type of card,
not to mention who issued it, is built into the number range itself.

Adam 'knows not that of which he speaks'.

Steven is correct.

_Some_ issuers used different blocks of initial digits on the card to
designate what type of card. Some DID NOT.

I wrote software for credit-card processing and related accounting functions
at a PPOE. t was _impossible_ to accurately generate -- at the time of the
transaction -- the 'costs' of processing certain 'card' transactions -- the
biggest 'offender' on this was VISA -- because one could _not_ determine
'debit' vs 'credit' AT THE TIME OF THE TRANSACTION, and 'debit' cards were
charged _MUCH_HIGHER_ transaction rates than 'credit' cards. I had
extended arguments with the support people at VISA itself (not the card
processor I used, not the issuing bank, _VISA_ -- who set the rates).
Some of the more polite language included things like 'pig in a poke'.

There was eventually a _lawsuit_ (not my employer) over this issue, the
card issuers lost, an the 'cost differential' was eliminated.

However, the inability differentiate 'credit' vs 'debit' in a non-trivial
percentage of cases _remains_.