(Turns out I threw the wallet in the recycling can while cleaning the garage. So I guess don’t pay me to build the system that replaces physical identity tokens.)
Next morning after more than ~1 hour of turning my apartment upside down I, out of desperation and thanks to intuition, dove into container and recovered my trash bag. Everything apart from cash survived.
Fire damage.
Exception: When I'm out running, if cell phones are forbidden (certain locations at certain customers), or if I wear a suit (things like weddings, funerals and when I celebrate 17th of May.)
If a pair of trousers cannot hold these items I don't buy them.
Sticking to these invariants makes for less frustration. Not sticking to them means frustration twice a month or so.
Then I read your comment and realized I've done this like 6 times in last year...
If I report a lost debit/credit card to prevent fraud then the card is cancelled and I can't pay with my phone and have to wait a week for a replacement card. At least I can still drive without a physical licence.
My "cash" or card transactions has gone down manifold over the last couple of years. Everyone, including roadside vendors, accept mobile payments that's enabled using UPI (unified payments interface) that's tied to my bank account. There are dozens of apps and "wallets" that use it, including Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Paytm, PhonePe, etc.
My income tax records are all available online, and "filing" is a matter of importing this data using a tool that the income tax department makes available on their website, checking the pre-filled forms, and pushing the "submit" button -- signed using an Aadhaar number enabled OTP.
Vehicle rego can be checked in the app so I can see my expiry and get notifications when renewal is due. We haven't had to attach any physical proof of vehicle registration since 2011.
The app can be used as proof of digital licences for boats, cars, trucks and for occupational licences (builders, tradies, security) since 2017. I can also view demerit points. Also does proof of age and more recently COVID checkins. The app was locally developed. I think most states here have similar systems https://my.sa.gov.au/
The inspection itself isn't anything complex I think they check brakes, headlights and such usually takes about 20 minutes I drop car off go and grab a coffee and it's ready when I get back.
Once the inspection is done everything else can be done online.
I don't mind the process so much (I only own 1 vehicle and live in city) but my parents for example live in a remote location (50 minute drive to get to mechanic) and have multiple cars, a boat trailer and a regular trailer which all have the same registration date so for my Dad it is pretty much an entire days adventure to get all the various inspections done.
Nearly everyone gets their car serviced regularly every 6 to 12 months and they risk being defected if driving with a fault. My guess is a comparison of road safety outcomes between states would show very little benefit as the other states haven't leapt in to follow the example.
I remember paying my SA car rego with laptop over Maccas wifi in Devonport after rolling off the ferry sometime in the naughties. We didn't do it with our phones because they were still potatoes.
Like the US it is a federal system and states have constitutional authority over road rules, registration and licensing and can do their own thing. Every state has its own websites and apps for these things. Half our states do not have digital licences yet but some of them will be ahead in other areas. I suspect if we had to wait for something national to happen the less progressive states would hold us all back.
It meets all identity requirements and has the benefit of not providing your address.
Little known fact: you can have a PO BOX address on your driving license (California). When you give the DMV your physical residence address, and a different mailing address, they will print the mailing address on the driver license. That's what I do.
Of course green card holders have a separate id card that they legally must carry with them at all times, so they don’t need a passport card.
It is utterly beyond me to guess how such a system can possibly make any sort of meaningful difference to law enforcement. Or even how it can be enforced in any meaningful way.
My friend just carried a copy of the card - not sufficient to meet the requirements of the law, but probably enough to satisfy any initial inquiries until you can get your physical card.
$540 total fee "if your card is lost or stolen."
OFFICER: what is your immigration status, Sir?
IMMIGRANT (thinking fast): uhh, er, pure blooded, Sir!
OFFICER: on your way then, young lad! I can't ask for your id because you don't need one. Have a nice day.
Not likely they can catch someone out unless they literally have his picture in hand. In which case, he obviously has bigger problems then not having his id card on him...
Along I-10, we were stopped 5 different times at immigration checkpoints and asked a single word question "American?" and sent on our way. Our final stop was on the bypass bridge next to the Hoover Dam, same single word question, except this time, they required our IDs and asked for passports.
My wife and I are US Citizens, and at the time had no passports. Mine had expired around the year 2000, and she had never had one. Trying to explain that to some asshole hassling us felt impossible. After 15 minutes of us pulled to the side, they brought our licenses back to us and sent us on our way.
We never drove to Vegas again.
I had an acquaintance who carried a non-citizen US passport... TIL apparently there is an edge case for certain Pacific Islanders.
Most of the population use insecure Android phones and are not the Little Snitch & 1Password wielding HN crowd.
[0] https://dcurt.is/apple-card-can-disable-your-icloud-account
It's not just charges made on your Apple card. Here's a comment thread[1] from two years ago when I mentioned Apple did the same thing to me over a recurring charge for iCloud that failed because I got a new debit card and didn't update it in time. (I was traveling.)
Unlike the author of the post you linked I was given zero notice or warning that all-things-Apple would stop functioning. I had assumed the charge would just fail the same way any other charge to a "bad" card wouldn't go through and that my iCloud subscription might lapse. I never in a million years imagined the charge would create an $8 debt to Apple payable immediately and that my iPhone (which I owned outright, not financed through Apple or anyone else) would be bricked unless and until I paid up. I was unable to download anything from the app store at all until I entered new payment information. I couldn't even download free updates to free third-party apps.
Over $8.
Last time you described this situation as "the app store was basically bricked on my phone". That's quite a difference.
I had set up my iphone to only update on wifi, and was travelling for a month or so only using mobile network.
When I tried to get an uber, I realized the app didn't work correctly (the driver appeared to be in the middle of the ocean). Same for other apps.
Games and apps that don't use heavy server code work fine, but google maps, uber, whatsapp, facebook, and some of the KEY things will break eventually if you never update them.
I was not impressed.
The phone might as well be bricked, updates fail and constantly pop up the payment screen, can't install new apps.
It's like having a virus on your phone.
He said his Bank Account info had changed and the Auto-Pay to Apple Card failed. He mentions a card decline but that he had available balance, he never mentions that is Apple Card is disabled however and is vague about the specifics surrounding the card.
He bought a Macbook, didn't or wasn't able to fulfill the trade-in, and thus the Apple Store determined he owed the amount they credited for the Trade-In. So when the Apple Store tried to debit his Apple Card for the trade-in amount it failed. The Apple Store then disabled the device purchased and the accounts associated with the purchase.
I have a feeling if you tried to do this with a Pre-Paid Visa or a Debit Account, Apple would still disable the device and accounts.
* Yeah it's just what I said. Apple/Store froze his accounts, not Apple Card.
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/03/03/apple-missed-apple-card...
This will happen to anyone's accounts if they don't fulfill a transaction with Apple Store. It has nothing to do with Apple Pay.
** I also find it strange that he missed an email from Apple telling him he was delinquent on his purchase AND didn't see any emails about an Auto-Pay failure all while waiting for an email from Apple Support about his account being disabled.
In this case, the person received a trade-in credit for a phone, did not send the phone in, and then when Apple tried to collect the trade-in credit, that payment bounced.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/03/apple-card-apple-id-unrelated...
What if that phone had got lost/stolen in transit, instead of not being sent at all?
https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/03/apple-card-apple-id-unrelated...
They did not do this.
He forgot to send them his trade-in and that triggered it. Nothing to do with the card.
It’s kinda outrageous he hasn’t updated the article to indicate this.
"Cool people don't say they're cool".
The rest of their Apple ID, as far as I can tell, was unaffected. It's another example of big claims turning out to be far more mundane. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26430248
Regardless, it doesn't make sense to me: Visa (Chase Bank) can't lock me out of a damn thing on on the phone I bought on Amazon. They can't even take the phone away: Most credit cards are unsecured debt, the phone isn't collateral that can be repo'ed. Store-branded cards, though also backed by a bank, are sometimes different and purchases are also security for the debt: one of the reasons I stay away from them. I live debt-free, have been fortunate to always be able to do so apart from a small mortgage, but don't really like the idea that a really bad run of luck could be compounded by having some of the things I need taken away from me as I try to dig myself out of a hole.
Heck, they didn't even owe Apple money. They owed money to the bank backing the card: Goldman Sachs.
Dustin Curtis claimed his Apple Card was the issue, but it wasn't. His not turning in his trade-in was the issue; that's owed to Apple directly.
The mere fact that you can "buy" a game on the Sony store that is available for multiple devices but not be able to play it on all of those devices is already ridiculous.
This license ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license. The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services. To make use of the Content and Services, you must have a Steam Account and you may be required to be running the Steam client and maintaining a connection to the Internet.
How do you get one when you're abroad? No idea. You probably don't.
One year I had an epic week of fraud. My credit card number was stolen by someone involved with a local restaurant, the replacement credit card was stolen from my mailbox, and my rent check was stolen from my landlord's mailbox at a completely different address (and successfully cashed!) There was a 3 day period where the only money I had access to was the cash in my wallet because my credit cards, checking account and savings account were all frozen while their account numbers got switched. All the fraud was covered by my bank though.
SEPA direct debit is the usual setup for places where you'd expect to be able to pay via credit card (regardless of fees), and for e.g. small landlords you just set up a recurring SEPA push transfer (basically like ACH push, but free for normal consumer accounts) to the landlords account.
And for direct debit, you can technically just keep an eye out for unauthorized ones (they need to be shown to your bank 5 days in advance) and tell your bank to stop them before they debit your account. But AFAIK it's the bank(s) that owe you the money, though they can in-turn try to claw it back from whoever debited your account without authorization.
Really, the worst one can do with an IBAN is trolling by spamming transfers to it or signing it up for direct debits (and I'd expect that to cause me at most 1 bank day of no funds, while waiting for my bank to reverse a fraudulent debit). But the impact of the latter is limited (just set up a whitelist with your bank and have them auto-reject the spam), while the former is fairly costly (around 20~30 ct with the accounts that don't do fair-use throttling) and quite risky (harassment and KYC).
I haven’t needed the redundancy since then but it’s comforting to know that I have a multi-month cushion to fight with banks if I need one.
I only carry plastic because I find paying with the phone a bit cumbersome and besides the card doesn't have a battery and fits better in a pocket.
I have multiple spares laying around just in case. Sometimes the cats hide one, so what, the branch office is in 15 minutes walking distance.
Internet access is better and much cheaper too.
Maybe because Russia haven't had monstrous incumbents in either place and as a result the market worked as intended.
The one bank that doesn't have branches, Tinkoff, uses courier delivery.
You go to your embassy wherever you are and notarize a document that authorizes a trusted party within the country to deal with the bank (and forward you the plastic). If you don’t need cash, you can issue a non-physical card with a click and use it via Apple Pay.
Just curious.
I have Amex because I trust them most to be on _my_ side instead of the merchants side by default. It's not accepted everywhere though. I use this preferentially anywhere its accepted that seems even the slightest bit sketchy.
I have both a Visa and a MasterCard - each from different banks, because I've been caught out when one bank's network is down and I couldn't pay for stuff or withdraw cash while travelling. I've never experienced a failure of ether Visa or Mastercards backends, but when I decided I needed a second source of credit/debit card at a seperate bank, I figured I may as well make sure I have one of each.
I have debit cards because they're pretty much an automatic part of having an account and a credit card, and also because I keep the credit limits on my cards low intentionally, and can use a debit card or online banking savings account with a much higher daily limit for large purchases.
I have one extra "single purpose" Visa card with a high credit limit and that gets used exclusively for my Apple/Google/AWS/Linode/DigitalOcean accounts. This is for peace of mind that my AppStore/GooglePlay accounts and my hosting accounts will _always_ charge successfully - the credit limit is over 10 times my total monthly spend over those accounts, I could conceivably vanish for a whole year and those would still all get automatically paid.
I grab a new one every couple of years when I see one with advantageous terms. I typically only use a couple of them at a time, but I keep the old ones around because: why not? Having more available credit is only a good thing.
This is, weirdly, backwards. Your credit rating is improved by having lots of available credit (i.e. lots of credit cards), which keeps your utilization percentage low, and by having a very high number of years on your oldest credit accounts.
> and also to avoid the extra card related expenses and charges.
Many cards have no fees.
[edit: i just checked and that card currently has an available credit of $-0.05 which I guess means I'm giving the bank a $0.05 credit line!?]
Debt burden and length of credit history are, together, 45% of someone’s score, and these are both improved by having a lot of old unused credit cards.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_score_in_the_United_S...
Also because closing accounts can negatively impact your score (by reducing your average age of accounts)
His father ran his entire construction company paying everything he could on the highest rewards based credit card available at the time. He apparently put over 12 million through it in two years. (I suspect it was about an order of magnitude lower than 3% cashback on that, but it was still a nice chunk of honeymoon and travel bills paid "for free", or more accurately by the bank and their merchants, and probably at least somewhat passed on to the construction company's customers in prices high enough to cover the credit card rewards scheme...)
Another comment here about invalid card number also reminds me about my passport. I have a Danish passport but never lived there, so my id number has X-es in it in instead of all numerical. That's pretty hard for various form validators to accept..
If someone on the phone could convince a card company to send a new credit card to a random address in a random country, do you have any idea what kind of field day scammers would have?
Not "someone". Me. They happily secure phone actions by both a password and 2FA just like online access. After that point you can do literally anything else with the account, including close it or get a copy of the card details.
Thwarting the verified owner of the account is not fraud prevention.
On the subject of thwarting and card details, though, neither CapitalOne's website nor mobile app will show my card number nor will they let me create temporary card numbers _after_ I've authenticated with a strong password and 2FA whenever I happen to be outside of the country. It just says "Oops, something went wrong". It took me weeks to figure out the first time that it was because I wasn't on a US network.
Their processes are both extremely annoying and can fail and lock out the legitimate account owner (the reason many of you have had trouble replacing cards abroad is because "shipping to a previously known address" is itself a security measure) while at the same time being vulnerable to a targeted attack from someone with knowledge of how the process works.
There must be some safeguards beyond the various identity questions they asked me - but I don't know what they were.
When the NEXT card didn't arrive I went by my old house and sure enough the folks living there had received all three copies. Then I got to spend a few hours being passed around to various people on the phone with the credit card company before I could find the person who knew about the super secret place where the replacement card address was apparently stored.
Edit: Ha, I just remembered the saga actually continued the next time I moved. Remembering this experience, I wanted to proactively have them change not just the regular address, but also the replacement card address. Unfortunately, try as I might, I couldn't find anyone who would believe me that just updating the regular address on the account wouldn't work. Sure enough though, when it was time for a replacement, it once again went to the old address!
That all sounds good. I'd be curious how the customer experience is when there's an unrecognized charge or you need to open a dispute though.
It's as easy or easier than disputing any other credit card charge. Open the wallet app. Tap the card to bring up a list of transactions. Tap the transaction you want to dispute. Tap "Report an Issue". Tap one of "Dispute Charge", "Unknown Transaction", "Incorrect Merchant Info", or "Other Issue".
It is a good idea assuming you can guarantee the security of the card. Banks typically don't have an incentive to defraud each other by supplying backdoored cards, so banks could indeed partner with each other allowing people to go into any local bank branch, acquire a card and then call their bank to associate it with their account. Of course, you still have the identity verification problem there, as you wouldn't want an attacker to be able to associate a card they acquired with your account and then spending your money.
However, if you're going to solve the identity verification problem for the above, why bother with a card at all? We all have phones or similar computing devices that can act as a card (for Apple Pay & Google Pay, the phone literally simulates a contactless card).
That only changes the card number used for online purchases, not the number on the physical card’s magstripe. The magstripe number doesn’t change, so if you get skimmed, you still need a whole new card.
There’s nothing special about the physical Apple Card.
As for online payments, you might as well use something like Privacy.com that gives you a separate number for each service. That’s better than Apple’s solution, and I’m still not sure why Apple doesn’t do that.
it seemed to me then, and now, that that was a much better experience than waiting for it nervously in the mail.
Schwab dropped this ball and left me in the Guatemalan jungle for 18 days after many assurances that they would definitely not send the new card to my home address. Embassy? Nope. Hotel? Impossible. But sure enough it reached my house. Schwab was great, but this was too much.
I was very impressed.
And what if your phone is stolen or lost? The hassle is no different than card ...
I recommend:
TransferWise https://wise.com/gb/borderless/card
Revolut https://www.revolut.com
> When you use Apple Card, our issuing bank and payment network partner — Goldman Sachs and Mastercard — and their service providers receive information about your transaction, including the merchant, time, and amount in order to operate Apple Card. Neither Goldman Sachs nor Mastercard share or sell your transaction information with third parties for advertising or marketing. [0]
Hmm, I wonder why they sell it then? Since they needed the "advertising or marketing" qualifier, they obviously sell data to third parties.
1. Maybe they are selling purchase data to hedge funds? Lots of possible use cases.
2. Maybe some regulation only requires them to disclose if the information is sold for advertising or marketing (I think I remember this showing up on some post-CFPB credit card disclosure forms). Therefore the lack of such a disclosure for other uses for the information could mean nothing, just that they are minimizing discourses that aren’t legally obligated.
Just about anyone with a financial account in the US will probably instantly recognize this form:
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/rules/privacy-con...
Should I be able to get your replacement credit card delivered to my home address with that?
> Both your and the parent's points are valid. Identity verification is a hard problem that the major legacy banks have a big problem with. Their processes are both extremely annoying and can fail and lock out the legitimate account owner (the reason many of you have had trouble replacing cards abroad is because "shipping to a previously known address" is itself a security measure) while at the same time being vulnerable to a targeted attack from someone with knowledge of how the process works.
If you're conditioned to give your password to your bank over the phone, I can use those three piece of information, and will happily call you up, posing as a bank CS representative.
If you think you're smart enough to not fall for that, let's suppose for a moment that you may be right. But what about your 76-year-old grandmother? Is she going to consistently be able to make a determination between a legitimate, and a fraudulent bank CS representative who wants her to confirm her username and password? Or is she going to have an easier time in a world where you never, ever, ever, ever give another human being your password over the phone?
Do you want convenience, or security? Actually, the better question is, does your bank want convenience for you, or security for them? (Because they are ultimately on the hook for fraud)
What? Seriously? There's nothing to fall for here.
You should never trust an inbound call. If your bank calls you, you take their information, immediately hang up, find the banks phone line and call that number back yourself.
'We have detected fraudulent activity, call us back with the number on the card.'
You hang up. They don't. You pick up the phone, and dial the number on the card.
Depending on how landline phone routing works in your area, you hanging up does not end the call. You picking up the phone again resumes the previous call, you dialing some numbers does nothing, the scammer makes some telephony noises, and goes ahead and resumes their conversation with you.
Nothing to fall for, eh?
Also, please keep in mind, we are apes. The logical centers of our brains turn off when your bank calls you to tell you that you are being robbed. Especially if your mind isn't as sharp as it used to be.
You'd probably have better luck calling the bank and trying to persuade them.
And again, this isn't about you. Most of the time, you don't pay for fraud, the bank does. That means that your bank is incentevised to reduce fraud, at the expense of your convenience - because not all of their customers are as smart as you are.
Do you have a scam in mind that doesn't depend on a rampaging time machine forcing me back to the 1990s? I don't think I've used an analog land line for decades, and I definitely don't know anyone who has one now.
You don't need a time machine to find one, you just need to leave the young techie bubble.
> I don't think I've used an analog land line for decades
You were cellphone-only since at least 2001? If you spent any time talking on the phone back then, your monthly bills must have been staggering.
I’ve had them send replacement cards to my hotel without problem.
This reminds me of a time I was traveling and had to cancel a lost credit card. I told the card company that I was not at home,was definitely outside of the country, not going to be home, definitely staying at an address that was not the home address listed on the account, wanted the card to be sent to _me_ and not my _home_, gave them my foreign delivery address 5 times over as many weeks, got 5 separate promises that the card was definitely going to reach me at my outside-of-the-country-and-not-at-home location in just a few business days, and the card never showed up. So I just gave up. And then, when I finally went home there were 5 goddamn cards in my mail slot.
Honestly this reason alone makes Apple's purely digital credit card my favorite. Need a new card number? Just push a button. No incompetent shipping divisions with 5 hops and as many business days between you and your ability to buy things when your card number is breached.