The Obama Credit Card Deception

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The WaPo tackles Obama hard on the credit card scandal regarding his donations. They make the point that Obama and Co. had to deliberately turn off the safegards in order to accept CC donations where the name and address don’t match the CC holder:

Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor’s identity, campaign officials confirmed.

Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged. Instead, the campaign is scrutinizing its books for improper donations after the money has been deposited.

The Obama organization said its extensive review has ensured that the campaign has refunded any improper contributions, and noted that Federal Election Commission rules do not require front-end screening of donations.

In recent weeks, questionable contributions have created headaches for Obama’s accounting team as it has tried to explain why campaign finance filings have included itemized donations from individuals using fake names, such as Es Esh or Doodad Pro. Those revelations prompted conservative bloggers to further test Obama’s finance vetting by giving money using the kind of prepaid cards that can be bought at a drugstore and cannot be traced to a donor.

The excuse given by the Obama campaign is that they vet the transactions afterwards. Complete and utter idiocy. They would rather pay staff to go through each one individually rather then allowing the safegards put into place by the credit card companies years ago, which would cost them nothing in money and labor?

Come on….

They are allowing these to go through to allow fraud, plain and simple.

Ed Morrissey spoke to some in the credit card industry and one response explains the fraud in detail:

I have over 30 years of experience in investigating Credit Card Fraud and I can tell you, which you may or may not know, that the merchant acquirer that is conducting the collection of credit / debit card for the Obama campaign are responsible for the actions to be taken regarding the Address Verification System responses. The value of the AVS system is that the issuer of the card being used provides back to the merchant acquirer a response based upon the information provided during the authorization process. This response indicates to the merchant acquirer if the card information was validated as to ownership of the account. It is the merchant acquirer that determines what to do when the authorization response is received. In most cases the transaction that comes back with any negative meaning is denied. However, if the merchant acquirer has adjusted their system to accept any response as acceptable the transaction would be completed.

The value of the AVS system is to deny Card Not Present transactions (CNP) which are suspicious. This protects the merchant against charge backs for bad transactions. What is interesting to me is that the merchant acquirer has knowingly violated a basic CNP fraud prevention technique to accommodate a merchant (Obama Campaign). I think that both the Associations (VISA & MasterCard) would be highly interested in looking at the merchant acquirer that was processing these transactions. The value of ignoring the AVS responses is that multiple invalid transactions may be made without fear of being rejected by the authorization systems. This means that the real owner of the credit card account is willing to allow multiple transactions to be made on the account using different names and addresses that under normal conditions would be denied. The merchant acquirer has a complete listing of all transactions done and it would be very interesting to see how many transactions were conducted on the same account number using different names. I would think that this would be a Federal violation under the current campaign funding laws.

Just a sign of the fraud to come if this guy is elected.

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The WaPo tackles Obama hard

And Campbell Brown swift kicks him in the kneecaps:

CAMPBELL BROWN: You may have heard that Wednesday night Barack Obama will be on five different TV networks speaking directly to the American people.

He bought 30 minutes of airtime from the different networks, a very expensive purchase. But hey, he can afford it. Barack Obama is loaded, way more loaded than John McCain, way more loaded than any presidential candidate has ever been at this stage of the campaign.

Just to throw a number out: He has raised well over $600 million since the start of his campaign, close to what George Bush and John Kerry raised combined in 2004.

Without question, Obama has set the bar at new height with a truly staggering sum of cash. And that is why as we approach this November, it is worth reminding ourselves what Barack Obama said last November.

One year ago, he made a promise. He pledged to accept public financing and to work with the Republican nominee to ensure that they both operated within those limits.

Then it became clear to Sen. Obama and his campaign that he was going to be able to raise on his own far more cash than he would get with public financing. So Obama went back on his word.

He broke his promise and he explained it by arguing that the system is broken and that Republicans know how to work the system to their advantage. He argued he would need all that cash to fight the ruthless attacks of 527s, those independent groups like the Swift Boat Veterans. It’s funny though, those attacks never really materialized.

The Washington Post pointed out recently that the bad economy has meant a cash shortage among the 527s and that this election year they have been far less influential.

The courageous among Obama’s own supporters concede this decision was really made for one reason, simply because it was to Obama’s financial advantage.

On this issue today, former Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, an Obama supporter, writes in The New York Post, “a hypocrite is a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue — who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings. And that, it seems to me, is what we are doing now.”

For this last week, Sen. Obama will be rolling in dough. His commercials, his get-out-the-vote effort will, as the pundits have said, dwarf the McCain campaign’s final push. But in fairness, you have to admit, he is getting there in part on a broken promise.

Read DEMOCRAT Bob Kerrey’s op-ed in the New York Post calling out the Dems’ campaign finance hypocrisy.

Now correct me if I’m wrong, but if they turn off CNP, wouldn’t that also allow transactions to proceed even if the cards were stolen?

he is a liar and he cares not where the money came from. he is a piece of crap and he will be sunk eventually. hopefully sooner than later.

Kind of tells you ow he got all those donations. You need to take the AVS system off, it is not just a switch, you have to intentionally turn it off.

“Now correct me if I’m wrong, but if they turn off CNP, wouldn’t that also allow transactions to proceed even if the cards were stolen?”

That it does, by turning off this feature it will then run cards and approve charges as long as the card owner has a balance to charge against.

Money + Power = Corruption!

Democrats +Money + Power = Corruption!

What a surprise.

Sarah Palin is the only one of the two tickets, that is not a millionaire. No corruption for Sarah Palin.

Both parties and their candidates are despicable. This remains true, for the most part, cycle after cycle.

Obama just seems to be raising the bar. To make matters worse he has millions convinced that he’s an honest man. He’s a tool of the establishment just like all the rest.

@Rocky_B:

Rocky, this site was recently set up to track the Obama credit card fraud issue. I also clearly explains the nuts and bolts of credit cards, users, merchants, credit card companies.

http://obamashrugged.com/

I found it interesting that Obama has to pay a fee for every transaction *because* he turned off the AVS. It’s costing him thousands and thousands of dollars. But, as in the debate, he didn’t seem to think the $18 billion wasted on pork was much to be concerned about, it’s only money and he seems to be very careless with it. Here he’s spending a little to gain a lot, probably would be the same with earmarks, but, it’s never his own money being spent and what he is doing is dishonest.