• Jay (unregistered)

    Going just on the information in the original story, we don't know WHAT is stored on the card. It appears that the card stores the balance. But there is zero evidence that it does not store more information than that. It might store some identification of the student to whom the card was issued. It might not, but we have no way to know. It might store some record of transactions. We don't know.

    Assuming that the vendors don't give things away to students just for the shear joy of advancing higher education, it seems likely that eventually they get reimbursed for purchases made with the cards. Again, from the information in the story, we don't know how detailed the records are. It could be the vendor system just keeps a total of amount owed, they go to the school and say, "See, it says right here you owe me $X" and the school pays. Or maybe they have a more detailed audit trail, like on this date the card with this id number was used to buy this much.

    I guess from the fact that the school didn't just promptly send the police to the student's dorm to arrest him, any audit trail was insufficient to instantly track him down. Or maybe they knew exactly who it was but decided that the effort of prosecuting wasn't worth the amount stolen. Etc etc.

    Even without an audit trail, surely once the school saw that more money was coming out of the system than was going in, they would know that some sort of fraud was going on. At that point, again assuming that the amount being stolen was worth the effort, they could have the vendors watch who is buying unusually large amounts and then call such people in for questioning. They could get a student -- or someone who could pass as a student -- to ask around where he can get an "upgrade" to his card. If they're selling a lot of these, it can't be a very close secret. Etc etc. Police do this sort of thing all the time.

    Personally, totally asside from questions of ethics and morality, I would think that the small amount of money to be made on a scam like this wouldn't be worth the risk of getting caught and having a criminal record.

  • Decius (unregistered)

    Why bother selling it? Report the card stolen, buy a new one, and then enjoy all the free stuff you want with your 'stolen' card. Sharing it with others is begging to get caught.

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to TheChewanater
    TheChewanater:
    Lance:
    Nagesh:
    Here in Hyderbad, theeving is very common even in University where rich kids are being.
    Yes, and here in Oklahoma, counterfeiting is a Federal offense.
    I've heard of nullification, but I've never heard of a federal law that only applies to one state.

    He didn't say the law applied to ONLY Oklahoma, just that it applied to Oklahoma. If I say, "It rained in Detroit yesterday," surely you would not understand me to mean that it did not rain anywhere else.

  • (cs)

    U2V0ZWMgQXN0cm9ub215 ???

    That's the combination of my luggage!!

  • Stevie D (unregistered) in reply to Grey
    Grey:
    Are such cards really worth the effort?
    I had one (Mondex) when I was at university, and I found it really handy - saved having to worry about fiddly small change, which is great when you're using vending machines, canteens, laundry, payphones etc so much. (Oh yes, and bars. Don't forget bars). These days, I go to the supermarket and put a week's worth of shopping on my credit card, my phone is on a monthly contract, my washing machine doesn't ask me for coins before it will do a wash – it's surprising just how many small transactions students will typically make.

    Ultimately, too few shops outside the university were prepared to accept it as a payment method, and it fizzled out and died. I never heard of it being because of fraud, though, just a lack of usage.

  • anon (unregistered) in reply to Paco
    Paco:
    In Holland, we use a similar system for public transport (trains, busses, etc.). It is also known how to decrypt the 32-bits encryption, and card-readers can be ordered for about $40. The government organizations introducing this chip, still want to keep it...

    I find it amazing at how diligent governments are when it comes to security measures for printed money and how negligent they are with security for digital money.

  • Cinnamon colbert (unregistered)

    At the university where my Dad worked, it took them a while (as in more then a second) to realize that having an email system with a "reply to all" button, as in reply to the entire campus, was not a good idea...

  • cogo (unregistered) in reply to Justice Powers
    Justice Powers:
    Have you ever had a look at how many prosecutions are actually successful?

    Me neither, but it was in the paper that the UK gov wanted to know how many serious crimes get to the stage where someone is charged with the crime by the police. That does not include theft of handbags, but it does include cases where nobody was charged ten years after the fact, or twenty different people, some of them several times, with no conviction in sight.

    Make your guess now.

    One.

    In.

    Ten.

  • Reow (unregistered)

    They had the same sort of system at Monash Uni in Australia in the late 90's. If you knew the right guy, he'd sell you $50 cards for $5.

  • Nordic CS guy (unregistered)

    The uni i went to had a similar system in place to handle printing fees, but to feed your balance you had to transfer credit to your uni-card from your regular pay card through a webservice. Me and a couple of other CS students found a bug in the system that in pratice, meant that if you wrote in a too short or too long card number you uni-card would get the credit but no cash was drawn from your regular card. We ended up using this bug to line our pockets a bit during our years at the uni. i went back a few years after i had graduatet and they were still usign the same system, bug and all.

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