Anonymity Credit Card Style
November 15, 2007
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Identity theft is a big issue. If you talk to anyone who has been a victim of that particular crime you can get a feel for how incredibly disruptive it can be to your life.
What if a credit card company came along and changed things up to help protect consumers? What are some of the things they would have to do to keep their cardholder’s identity safe?
For starters they would have to remove information like card holder names and account number from the card, right?
Sound crazy, doesn’t it?
Well there is a new credit card company that is doing that very thing.
Revolution Card is a new credit card that leaves the account number and card holder name off of the card.
I think they may very well be on to something. Sounds a little like the PayPal of credit cards.
For those of you unfamiliar with PayPal, it is a system that makes money transactions via email. The person you send or get money from only sees your email address. Your financial information is theoretically much more protected because you can change the email address associated with your account.
In the same way the Revolution Card uses a pin number for each transaction. And they even allow you to create temporary pin numbers. That can be a useful feature for one time purchases, dealing with unfamiliar merchants, and when working online.
I suspect we will be seeing much more of Revolution Card in the future.
Thanks to Valeria Maltoni who shared about this in Fast Company.
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Tags: Business, Finance, Credit, Fast Company, Identity Theft, Revolution Card, SuccessCREEations, Valeri Maltoni
this is a wonderful post but let me add this,In actuality, studies show that as much as 70% of all identity theft cases result from an “inside job”. That means that an employee or co-worker of a business where you shop could be an identity thief, some one ve to be very careful the way he is handling his credits card
Good point, Simon. Sounds like that is another argument in favor of the Revolution Card because the merchant doesn’t get access to your financial information.
So even if there were a shady employee at a business where you shop they wouldn’t be able to access your account.
Hi Chris
Is it just me, but how can you use a card like this when buying online - paying over the phone??
(Or didn’t I read their site properly?)
Karin H. (Keep It Simple Sweetheart, specially in business)
Which is the point I made at Conversation Agent today, and a very valid one, Simon. We had an instance at Commerce Bank locally where it was discovered that an employee had disclosed private information about a number of customers to a third party.
Thank you for picking up the conversation thread, Chris. And maybe aside from forming more partnerships with merchants, there are other ways that we as customers can think about that would make this offering spread…
Credit Card companies are legally required to not charge you if you are the victim of fraud. When you get those calls “There is some suspicious activity on your account, and we were calling to make sure you still had your card” They are covering their OWN behinds.
Not to say that this card isn’t a good idea. I just think this is good information to have.
Valeria, Thanks for bringing this new direction in credit industry to our attention. I’m wide open to ideas on how to help get the word out. I’ll do some noodling on my own too.
Advice, Yeah. We never complain at our place when our credit card company calls us to verify a purchase. I’d much rather have them call me on some of our legitimate purchases then ignore our account if it were actually being abused by a third party.
Karin, I don’t know the details, but they said it uses a pin number supplied by the user along with some sort of encrypted info on the card itself.
I’m not sure how that would work without presenting the physical card (I don’t yet have one of their cards myself.) But I figure if PayPal can do secure money transactions with an email address, then there’s probably a way for it to work.
@simon, that is quite disturbing. It means that no matter how much we try to protect ourselves, we can’t get away with it if it’s an ‘inside job’. I remember when I was working in a telephone banking call centre. I had full access to everyones account details. I could have just taken these details after I left the job, and no one would have known.
David, I think Simon is referring more to unscrupulous people in a merchant’s store than in the bank itself.
Not that it’s really any better, mind you.
I’m confused - how can a merchant verify a card holder’s signature if there’s no name on the credit card? I always write “check ID” on the back of my card hoping to be asked by cashiers to see my ID. Maybe 1 in 20 do. Without a name, would there just be a signature to verify?