Is there a downside to making this illegal? Should a foreign entity really have a say in a sovereign countries elections?
The lack of a CVV2 field on the Obama for America website is very suspicious. CVV2 is the 3-digit or 4-digit number on the bank of your credit card that you enter for a card-not-present purchase (e.g,, Internet or telephone). CVV2 is required by PCI regulations for all card-not-present transactions to prevent fraud. Failure to submit the CVV2 for a CNP authorization results in the merchant bank laying out huge non-compliance fees.
If a card taker (merchant) doesnÎÎt enforce AVS or CVV2 the credit card transaction is called ‘non-compliant’. Non-complaint transactions typically have a much higher discount rate than compliant transactions. A typical discount rate for compliant transactions is around 2.4-2.9%. If the card is from overseas it is called ‘international non-compliant’ and it goes even higher; the discount rate can shoot up to 7-10% per transaction.
An intrepid reporter could ask whether Obama’s merchant bank is actually assessing those penalties, or if there is a special agreement in to waive the penalties and if that constitutes an illegal payment-in-kind to the Obama campaign.
We’re talking tens of millions of dollars. It would make the Clinton-era China scandals look like stealing lunch money.
The key to uncovering this scandal is finding the identity of the bank. Îve been searching high and low since the whole AVS thing broke in 2008 and nobody seems to know.
And if it turns out that the mystery bank is actually in Shanghai or China..