Money is built
on trust. If I don’t believe that I can get some new goods in exchange for the
piece of paper that you give me in exchange for my services, then I will
probably choose not to work for you. While societies have made some peace with
such paper, thanks in a large part to governments attempting to establish trust
in currency with all the force of law, its limitations led to new forms of
commerce. The new forms faced new trust issues as well, in many cases because
they were born of private initiatives. In Chapter 6, we reprised the anecdote
of The First Supper. The credit card associations have subsequently provided a
variant of currency that drives commerce in general, and commerce on the Web
specifically. It is interesting to note that the most recent television
commercials for credit cards actually disparage the use of actual cash because
it makes a transaction too slow. But, such was not always the case.
In the early
days, while local credit card use could keep trust in the new form of money
under control, it was immediately clear to both clients and merchants that
fraud could very easily affect them. A thief duplicating a card and using it to
make a purchase would result in a situation where the merchant would eventually
ask the wrong person for payment. Depending on settlement modalities, this
situation would directly affect the client, the merchant or both. Clearly, the
banks issuing the cards needed to solve the problem, which they did by offering
various guarantees of compensation to both clients and merchants in cases of
fraud. That moved the liability for fraudulent transactions into the banking
camp, which was then confronted with mounting fraud. This rather naturally
followed from the precept that unanswered fraud leads to more of the same. That’s
where the United
States
and Europe took two different paths, for reasons
that were totally unrelated to the payment universe, as they had to do with the
billing for telephone networks.
In the United States, the fees for telephone service were
paid on a monthly basis, independent of usage as long as calls remained local.
In France, which would take the lead in the
management of fraud with the new form of money, local calls were metered and
therefore telephone fees were based on usage, just as long distance calls are
in the United
States.
This had the effect of discouraging merchants to make a call to verify the
validity of the credit cards they were presented with. This in turn created
opportunities for fraud. Conversely, in the United States, if the banks could offer merchants a
local number to call for verification, they would have means to double-check
the validity of a card prior to a transaction. Detecting and countering fraud
in this manner became something of an art form for banks that were particularly
good at it.
As the volume of
payments by credit card increased, manual verification of transactions became
impossible and therefore computers were brought to the party. The first thing
that a computer can do very effectively is to check the card data against a revocation
list that contains information about cards stolen or otherwise invalid.
That’s why we are asked to report a lost credit card rapidly; the card issuer
can enter that information in the database, and subsequent checks will return a
warning. In the United States, virtually as soon as new information is
obtained on invalid cards, it is available for double-checking thanks to the
immediacy provided by the free local call. In France, in order to save money, merchants would
typically wait until a certain number of transactions were completed before sending
the bundle for processing via the phone line. Obviously, this left some
opportunity for additional fraud, since merchants would not get immediate
information on the validity of the card. To mitigate this threat, card issuers
began to send out periodic revocation lists to the merchant. However, the
manual processing of verification was still too cumbersome and new means of
fighting fraud were sorely needed.
|