Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by charcircuit 378 days ago
>and you'll get a visit from the feds/FBI/whatever if you do it

Is there any proof to this statement or are you just trying to scare people? I think it's possible there are bigger groups that would have their attention and a single fraudulent transaction would just be noise.

1 comments

In his scenario I don't understand where he'd send the transaction to begin with?

In a typical scenario my understanding is that you get the terminal from your acquirer - this is your broker to the card networks. When the terminal makes a transaction, it does some crypto magic using its own keys (that identify it to the acquirer), sends that to the card which does more crypto magic using its own keys, and finally the result of that is sent to the acquirer.

If you do this flow yourself with fake keys you'd get the card to sign a transaction for your fake terminal's key (assuming you know the card's PIN of course - unless you're happy to forego any CVM), but you have no acquirer that would accept said transaction, so I don't see how you could commit a crime here even if you wanted to? You just got some meaningless bytes back.

And of course, if you have an actually valid terminal key that is trusted by an acquirer and do all this, you've effectively just made a normal payment - if the person was willingly paying you then no crime either, and otherwise it's no different than using a legit terminal to bill someone without their knowledge.

> And of course, if you have an actually valid terminal key that is trusted by an acquirer and do all this, you've effectively just made a normal payment - if the person was willingly paying you

You can charge more than the displayed value. But that's pretty much it.