Violating Campaign Finance Reform
Over at Hot Air, Ed Morrissey quotes an expert on the checks put in place to protect against credit card fraud and how it seems the Obama campaign bypassed these checks to facilitate acquiring donations:
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.
I anxiously await Darwin’s strong denunciations of the Obama’s campaigns attempts to circumvent basic checks against credit card fraud to facilitate campaign donations. Darwin supports such regulations so I fully expected him to have harsh words for campaigns that attempt to circumvent such regulations, even democratic ones.