Hacker News Reader

Comment by matt4077 | Hacker News Reader

Once, at Cape Town airport, this really cool dude picked me up and showed me my rental car. iPad, Beats, old-school Hip Hop, the works...

When I gave him my credit card for the deposit, I expected him to use some fancy wireless reader, or maybe the iPad's camera to be used to scan it.

Instead, he took out a pencil and a notebook, and, within 15 seconds, made a perfect imprint of the card by placing it behind the paper and carefully painting the area with the pencil at a low angle.

View on HN

That's essentially how they worked before instant electronic funds verification. Old timers like me remember when retailers would pull out a large metal slab with a cut out area for the card. They would put a piece of paper over it with blue carbon paper between two sheets and pull a slide from one side to the other, making an imprint of the numbers onto the piece of paper for the customer to sign. One copy would go to the customer, the other would be kept with the retailer.

For a while after electronic transactions companies would lug them out when the "lines were down," but I haven't seen one in quite a while.

Here is a "modern," light weight plastic version:

https://banksupplies.com/199-48500?origin=google-shopping&gc...

Yeah it's odd to think not too long ago that's how credit cards were copied. The big slidy handle machine went ka-chunk! A faint imagine from physically rubbing against your card with carbon paper was legit way to do it.

I always thought those were what Americans meant when they said their credit cards used magnet stripes because credit cards were rare and my country had already moved past magnet stripes when I saw the machines in American movies as a child. Using physical imprints seems like an obvious recipe for fraud, even more than magnet stripes (which already seem reckless compared to chips).

Don't forget searching for the card number in a book of stolen/canceled card numbers.

Obligatory Steve Martin reference: https://youtu.be/FCJx1uV38ZQ

"The Jerk, " was such a classic movie.

The, uh, minstrelsy part of that movie has aged poorly.

When they have computer/network problems, Chipotle breaks out their "crash kits" which include an imprinter. I've seen this at two separate restaurants. It never fails to make me laugh, and either because they don't do it much or the process takes longer (probably both), it is very slow. But it impressed me that they have a backup plan.

Unfortunately the imprinter fails on instant-issue cards without raised numbers, so it slows it down even more when they have to write all the numbers down.

We're unlikely to see them for much longer; my most recent credit card has the number as a sticker on the back, with no embossed printing at all anywhere on the card. (I've also got an even more recent debit card that does still have the traditional style. But it seems like their days are numbered.)

IIRC the ones without are “online” cards given out to for instance students.

My Citi-issued Costco Visa card has no embossed numbers. I figure it's just Citi being cheap.

My Chase Manhattan card is also like this, although it's some sort of metal-based chip card, much ruggeder than the old plastic cards.

Some taxis still have this for when their Square reader doesn't work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com