Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
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UPDATED..WaPo: Obama Taking Illegal Donations UPDATE: Will Media Report Palestinian Campaigning for Obama from Gaza?

By: Pam On: Oct/29/08 - 6 Comments

How is he doing it?

  1. Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor’s identity, campaign officials confirmed.
  2. the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged. Instead, the campaign is scrutinizing its books for improper donations after the money has been deposited.

Here is just one example:

The Obama team’s disclosures came in response to questions from The Washington Post about the case of Mary T. Biskup, a retired insurance manager from Manchester, Mo., who turned up on Obama’s FEC reports as having donated $174,800 to the campaign. Contributors are limited to giving $2,300 for the general election.

Biskup, who had scores of Obama contributions attributed to her, said in an interview that she never donated to the candidate. “That’s an error,” she said. Moreover, she added, her credit card was never billed for the donations, meaning someone appropriated her name and made the contributions with another card.

Had the AVS been turned on, the on the donation would have needed to match the name on the credit card.

Fraudulent registrations. Fraudulent donations. Fraudulent candidate.

I first reported on this last week

UPDATE:Will Media Report Palestinian Campaigning for Obama from Gaza?

Holding All the Cards  “  On the grubby little racket :

Obama campaign’s deliberate invitation to pre-paid credit-card fraud :

Washington Post Hits Obama’s Shady Donations Again… Weakly

A little better than last time, but apparently they still haven’t heard of AVS, or the fact that you don’t need a prepaid credit card to “fool” Obama’s insecurity system.

Team Obama deliberately avoided credit-card security checks

There is only one reason to deliberately choose to bypass those security processes, and that’s to facilitate fraud.  Team Obama claims that they vet the donations after the fact, but that’s hogwash.  It costs far more to do that than to screen for security codes and address verification up front, and everyone knows it.  Obama counts on the fact that most of the fraud will fly under the radar of its victims, and the only cost they’ll incur is when they have to process refunds after getting a specific complaint.

This is a key, revelatory moment about Obama and his team.  They have deliberately chosen to make it easier for people to defraud the public so that they can ring up millions more in a campaign that has already broken records for fundraising.  It’s unethical, dishonest, and dangerous ” especially since these will be the same people with their hands on tax records if Obama wins this election.

Credit-card experts explain the extent of Obama’s deception

I have over 30 years of experience in investigating Credit Card Fraud and I can tell you, which you may or may not know, that the merchant acquirer that is conducting the collection of credit / debit card for the Obama campaign are responsible for the actions to be taken regarding the Address Verification System responses.  The value of the AVS system is that the issuer of the card being used provides back to the merchant acquirer a response based upon the information provided during the authorization process.  This response indicates to the merchant acquirer if the card information was validated as to ownership of the account.  It is the merchant acquirer that determines what to do when the authorization response is received.  In most cases the transaction that comes back with any negative meaning is denied.  However, if the merchant acquirer has adjusted their system to accept any response as acceptable the transaction would be completed.

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.

And from the same link, another opinion

You may have mentioned this elsewhere, but disabling the security allows would be credit card thieves to “ping” numbers till they get a hit.  The number of “pings” should have raised flags at Visa and MasterCard, don’t you think?

I wonder if they warned the Obama campaign, or worse, ignored it.

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Posted on: October 29, 2008 |

Posted in: Barack Obama, National News, Presidential Election '08

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6 Responses to “UPDATED..WaPo: Obama Taking Illegal Donations UPDATE: Will Media Report Palestinian Campaigning for Obama from Gaza?”

  1. SharkGirl
    October 29, 2008 - 08:32 AM on October 29th, 2008

    Does McCain’s team plan on challenging the integrity of Obama’s campaign if Obama wins? What really perplexes me is that judges are ignoring the laws, as if they want Obama to win.

    Homeless using park benches as addresses? Illegals getting to vote. Illegal donations. Racist church that hates Whites and Jews. Friends with terrorists.

    I don’t get it. Why do Americans want this man to be their leader? Are they blinded to what he stands for, or are they in support of what he stands for?

  2. Robert
    October 29, 2008 - 11:23 AM on October 29th, 2008

    Yes, it is just astonishing. Osama bin Obama has never even proven he is eligible to be President. The corruption and fraud surrounding his campaign would take years of investigation to sort out. So just never mind in the meanwhile from the MSM?

    This is sick, sad, and pathetic. It is a major factor in the decline of America.

    So go ahead, Obama suckers/supporters. Vote to destroy America. Because that’s what a vote for Obama is.

  3. AKD
    October 29, 2008 - 02:55 PM on October 29th, 2008

    Every election cycle, the right insists that this democratic nominee (Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama) is “the most liberal, the most dangerous,” etc.

    Tell us why we should vote FOR your guy, not just why we should vote AGAINST Obama.

  4. Pam
    October 29, 2008 - 02:59 PM on October 29th, 2008

    I do not recall people saying that Clinton was the most liberal..How old were you during his elections?

    Kerry and Obama are part of the radical left. There is no denying that.

    Each and every post tells us why we should be voting for McCain.

  5. Robert
    October 29, 2008 - 03:21 PM on October 29th, 2008

    “Every election cycle, the right insists that this democratic nominee (Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama) is “the most liberal, the most dangerous,..”

    And with the last three, it has been absolutely true…

  6. Obama Donation Primer Money Laundering…Team O Is Better Than The Drug Lords « Mcnorman’s Weblog
    October 30, 2008 - 02:43 PM on October 30th, 2008

    [...] More from Right Voices Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Self Explanatory:   [...]

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