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At 2:05 PM -0700 10/6/96, Steve Schear wrote: (quoting me)

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Are SSN and other ID required when opening a 'pre-paid' credit card account? That is, the ones for persons with poor credit who are required to maintain a balance sufficient to pay off the charges? Perhaps we could put our heads together and determine a way to become franchised by MC/VISA and offer 'affinity' type accounts with no address requirements (all statments are sent via remailer/nym email).

A couple of people on this list talked about a similar thing, a "Privacy Card," with the explicit policy of not reporting transactions in detail to the Big Three (the government-friendly TRW Credit, Equifax, and Transunion).

The idea being that if a "market for privacy" exists, someone ought to be able to make a nice piece of change offering a card that protects privacy.

One problem is that many people _want_ credit card transactions reported to the Big Three, to build up their credit record.

(But many don't care. I've been using a VISA card issued by my stock broker for 12 years now. It's a "debit card," though it's handled by a merchant exactly as a credit card, and they probably can't see any difference. What I gathered when buying my current house, is that none of these transactions were part of my "credit history," as I was actually using a debit card. All of those now using, or planning to use, a debit card would be ideal candidates for a "Privacy Card.")

No doubt.

Such a deal would have to be one of Visa, MasterCard, or Discover, with American Express a distant fourth. (I don't even know if these companies/tradenames would even allow such a thing, of course.) The cost of rolling out a brand new type of card would of course be prohibitively high.

The banks offering these pre-paid 'credit', really debit, cards are already offering such an instrument. Although I've got my hands full at the moment, I've been asked by several money sources to investigate some unconventional, but legal, instrument services. Seems, as you say, you only have to guarantee the holder that they and establish and transact business with relatively good anonymity.

(I have no expectation than this will be done, and I think I said so at the time. Ever the realist, in some ways, I knew no one would take on such a complex project. Just as no one followed through with the "Cypherpunks Credit Union" idea, discussed at several meetings in 1993.)

I'm not making any promises, but I have some banking experience (6 years at Citicorp) developing financial products, ATM, wireless and transaction crypto. The most difficult part, besides the marketing, would be getting a MC/VISA franchise under acceptable contractual terms. I've never done this sort of thing. Seems you wouldn't need to pitch this to MC/VISA any different than many of the other similar 'debit' cards. Unless their contracts specifically contain a 'know you payee' provision (required for checking and savings, which are Fed insured, and money transmitters), it shouldn't be a problem. -- Steve