@NeedADebitCard collects tweeted photos of debit cards

People are posting photos of their debit and credit cards on Twitter. Some of them are lightly blurred– such as the one above which has a fake tilt shift effect added to it –but most are just straight photos of the cards with all the information unobscured. Mostly these are new cardholders bragging about their newly-acquired financial freedom, a few people shared photos of cards they'd snapped in half.

They're all publicly available photos, and the Twitter account @NeedADebitCard dutifully collects them all in one place, ostensibly to teach people not to post their goddamned financial information all over the Internet. Why bother with ATM skimmers when you can just search the web?

@NeedADebitCard's Twitter Thanks, DeMarko!

• [Rick.]

  A while ago, there was a meme on Instagram to post things from your day. One day, it was the inside of your wallet. I couldn’t believe all the people who posted their credit cards and driver’s licenses with all the information visible. Well, I COULD believe it because people are stupid, but you know… 

• [peterblue11]

  these must be the same people that fall for the “did you know you can download this app and then use your ipad to weigh yourself?” prank.

  morons.

• [John Hickey]

  Not surprisingly if you look you quickly find they are all for really shitty cards like green dot prepaid cards, and rip off Indian reservation sell us your first born credit cards. 

• [TombKing]

  My not so better side of my self keeps whispering look new laptop… then I think better of it.
  I am once again reminded to never ever underestimate the stupidity of human beings, but this really stuns me.

  • [penguinchris]

    Pretty sure none of these accounts have enough money in them (even before they were posted on the internet) to purchase a decent laptop.

• [usonia]

  A co-worker posted his card on facebook a few weeks ago. It was saturday, he was high as hell. A bunch of us (with no lives, at home looking at facebook on a saturday) posted frantic comments along the lines of  “Jason! What the hell, take that down!”. By monday morning it was still up, and he thought we were all very funny. 3 days later, someone started buying stuff online with his card. He was naturally bewildered, and still has yet to put together that the photo of his card led to hours of headaches with his bank. Ta-da!

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    Do banks have software yet that scans the web looking for their cards so that they can refuse to refund people who do this?

  • [malindrome]

    Now my credit is ruined, and I know why …

    Because I got high.

• [John Hickey]

  To be fair though it is pretty doing anything with a CC without the 3 digit security code on the back. 

  • [dc0de]

    Sure John, because 3 digits, or even 4, are simply a 1000, or 10000 different combinations… I mean who would ever try to guess those? There aren’t computers fast enough today to rip through 10,000 different options until the right one is found…

    Oh, wait.  The other thing. I can do this with regular expressions, Microsoft Excel, and wget. It is childs play.

    These people simply prove that the dumb get dumber.  See; Idiocracy – the Movie.

    • [rtresco]

      But like a password, try a 3-digit number wrong two or threee times and the CC company puts a hold on it for suspicious activity – you’d never get your 1000 guesses. I think it’s a valid point that it’d be hard to use.

      • [knappa]

        A quick and dirty probability computation says that you would expect to need 334 cards to get a hit by randomly guessing the 3 digit secret code this way. Of course, if you lock a person’s debit card this way, there is a pretty good chance that they’ll call the bank and get it unlocked for you. So you can probably up your chances by waiting a week or so and retrying.

• [graywh]

  Similar:  Someone I know posted a pic of sports tickets with the bar code visible to a social networking site.  I told him it would be possible to gain entry with that information (assuming you got there before him) and he promptly removed it

• [dc0de]

  Anyone heard of the DEFCON Wall of Sheep?  It’s the same thing, for email, logins, and other account information, sent over wireless networks in plain text.  

  These people take all the hard work out of it… Truly shows how stupid people are…

• [blueelm]

  Wow. Just wow. It almost makes all the effort some folks put into scamming people look pointless. 

• [nunya]

  It is so much easier to just post photos of cash.

• [Jonathan Dowland]

  I agree that it is not sensible to post this info publically, but surely it is not sufficient to be defrauded. You need, at a minimum, the correct billing address and the CCV too, surely?

  • [timquinn]

    Sure, but how many addresses could there be? With my excellent computer skills I could hop on a tricycle and have all your money by lunch time. So there.

  • [Amy Kling]

    A friend of mine running an online business was just screwed by this assumption. The company that was verifying credit cards wasn’t verifying billing addresses and let a bunch of fraudulent orders through.

  • [Sean Dailey]

    My “card” was stolen a few months ago even though it was in my wallet the whole time. Just print a new one using the same numbers and you’re good to go with most in person transactions.

• [Dan Peguine]

  All jokes aside, I have to plug a company I work with – this is definitely a case for using BillGuard (http://billguard.com).. and not only for these imprudent souls, but I think that most of us have too much information online anyway :)