Research Project I’m trying to get off the ground

There is a project idea I’ve had for a few months now, tracking what happens to credit and debit cards that get posted to twitter. People are posting pictures of their cards to twitter. If I had to guess, because they are excited, want to show off, and think only their friends can read it.

There are a couple of bots that do the looking and retweet what they find. Cancel that Card and Need a Debit Card are the first two that come to mind. However it’s really easy to do it in tweet deck using the search feature and adding a column. Kyle ‘essobi’ Stone gave me a few pointers on how to make the results a little cleaner in the column (look at your options).

Talking with Sam Selil, I got some great pointers on a frame work, now just need to find funding to do it. As he pointed out we are dealing with anecdotal evidence that fraud is happening, and some hard solid research here would be good.

In the meantime, I have jumped on the bandwagon of warning people of their errors of posting the card.

One person responded “Haha well, it’s still safe cause the CVV is not shown. No one can ever use it!” However a CCV isn’t always needed, nor requested, when the Card is Not Present (CNP).  SiriusXM didn’t ask for it. All they asked is if I was an authorized user of the card. Yes I used my card, not the poor guy who said I didn’t have his CCV.

Today, I saw a few more. Some of the people I reached out to deleted the posts, that won’t help. I can still see their posts in the column in TweetDeck, and the number and name is there. There is also the fact that other people are doing the same. I also know there are sites that Index Twitter for searches and you can find deleted tweets through those. Even the Library of Congress is doing an NSA like grab of the tweets from Twitter, I’m sure the tweets there aren’t getting deleted either.

One person, posted her Visa card, and covered the first number. The first 4 numbers are used for card issuer id. By leaving the last 15 numbers and the logo of the issuer all the needed information for use was there.

Sometimes they’re posting pictures of other cards. One I saw today, that was deleted after I contacted her was a picture of her dad’s card. I’ve seen siblings posting pictures, I’ve seen strangers posting pics of cards they’ve found, and children posting pictures of their parent’s card.

Yes, I shake my head at how people use social media.

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