Credit cards as a legacy system
5th December 2022
This is a fascinating story that lays open an obscure aspect of the financial services realm in easy-to-grasp language.
I once worked for a company that did credit monitoring. The gateway to sales for this company was the CHECK YOUR CREDIT SCORE FOR ONLY $1! scheme, which I’m sure you’ve encountered. This, in turn, made them a piñata for fraudsters checking whether the card info they had just stolen was still ‘live’. The company had an entire team of six statisticians and coders, including two PhDs, to develop automated systems to weed such people out, because the penalties for accepting charges against accounts that eventually turned out to have been hacked was eating the company alive.