eli5 How Can Someone Hack your credit card just by knowing the credit card number ?

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Aren’t people supposed to know your pin in order to buy stuff with it? I haven’t had my credit card yet since I’m still a teen But I really wanna know how this works and why People constantly worry the msot about the credit card number

In: Economics

6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I love how all you need to comment the same thing 🤣
But forreal, all they need is your credit car number and your… wait no you stop there and you don’t even need to explain 5+ people already did you dorks!

Anonymous 0 Comments

The card number (and expiry date) are largely all you need to make online purchases. Some additional information is required (person’s name, security code on the back of the card, etc) but generally if you get the card number and expiry date you are in a position to get the rest of that information. No PIN required for online purchases because that’s tied to the card itself.

In person purchases have a few options to bypass. Tap-to-pay cards always provide the same information on each tap and could be copied and duplicated onto another card or device allowing for small purchases. The magnetic stripe is also easily duplicated, though used less often. Hacking the PIN/chip requirement requires the card itself, and basically requires the PIN terminal to be tampered with. As I recall it could lie to the card and say that it doesn’t support PIN input and some cards or companies will fall back to requiring a signature instead. So no PIN required, but requires the card itself and a retailer whose system is old or already compromised.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Online purchases don’t use your pin, they only use the numbers on your card (number, CVV, and expiration date). If you have those three, you could wipe a card out with Amazon purchases or whatever.

Even in person, the PIN isn’t really super important: it’s more requested for verifying a transaction’s origin, rather than allowing the transaction itself.

Anonymous 0 Comments

If someone gets your credit card number and expiry date they can use it for online purchases as these do not require a pin. Sometimes they need the ccv number on the back of the card for online transactions but not always. You only need the pin number for in store machine translations. If they have your car d details they will just keep purchasing untill in gets declined by either you or the bank or the limit of the card. Most of the time they will purchase gift cards then spend that money on what they want ad it’s harder to trace them.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Normally a debit card uses a pin, and a credit card doesn’t (you sign instead of putting in a pin).

But online, you never put in a pin. You just put in your card number, security code (3 numbers on the back), and expiration date. So a hacker (or rather, fraud-committer) already doesn’t need your pin to make online transactions.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Actually, pins are rarely necessary for a purchase. Online, they’re never used. Just the security code and expiration date, both of which are printed on the card and easily obtainable by a credit card thief. In person, most credit cards don’t have or require a pin for each purchase and usually if you’re using a debit card, you can choose to run it as credit so that it doesn’t ask for a pin.

The good news is federal regulations (at least in the US) require banks and credit card companies to reimburse you for fraudulent purchases as long as you report them in a timely manner (I think it’s like 30 days but I might be wrong). So as long as you pay attention to your monthly statements and online banking, it’s not the end of the world if your info gets stolen.