Credit card companies, give us a fake "verifiable" address

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When you buy stuff with a credit card online these days, they always want your address, because they will plug it into their credit card verification system, even if they are not shipping you a physical product.

I'm trying to give my physical address out less and less these days, and would in the long term love something like the addresscrow system I proposed.

However, as an interim, it might be nice to formalize a "fake" credit card billing address, authorized by the credit card company, that you can give when placing orders that will not be shipped to your physical address.

You can already do this, in that credit card verification systems tend to focus only on your street number and zip code, and rarely on your phone number, so you can make up a fake address based on this. If you live at 124 Elm St. 60609, you can usually get credit card verification with "124 Fake St. Chicago, IL 60609" choosing a street name that doesn't exist so the post office will discard that mail. (Though often post offices try to be "good" and will get mail to you even if the street name is wrong. I guess you could try 124 DoNotDeliver St. to give them the hint.)

If it became official, the post offices could better learn what to do. There are arguments for and against letting the biller realize the address is fake. Good billers would accept this and not add it to mailing lists. Bad billers might refuse to let you enter the address.

Comments

A variation would have Visa or Mastercard verify the transaction... (Or Google Checkout or PayPal or ...). Of course you'd have to trust them to not give your address back.

- ask

If we want to change the mechanics of transactions, there is a lot we can do. In fact, we should just go to the paypal "cheque" model where we give the merchant the money at our end, and there is no need for them to verify things, or we could use my addresscrow approach where you give them an address alias.

My simple idea here is a way to let the merchant & CC verify it's really you (or at least somebody who knows your secret verification address number) without having to give your physical address for a transaction that doesn't need it. No change to merchant software.

As you know with outsourcing and call centres outside of the country working for the US,, it appears that recently credit card info that was revealed to the call centre employees as part of the processing that had to be done,, was used by those employees to steal funds and such...And to think of it, how many times i must have repeated my date of birth, or my credit card billing address etc etc to some call centre employee-hmm,,scares me really to think of that

I've been using a fake street name a long time, but the junk mail still gets thru.

You can register a credit card with a bill-paying system such as PayTrust.com and use the addr they give you.

I use a personal private mail box which accepts fedex,ups,usmail etc but I have to go collect it. I dno't use my real addr for anything. Even voter registration.

I use it, and tried to register my credit card to it, and the credit card companies refused.

how do i get a fake credit card number and verification number

how do i recieve an fake credit card and credit card verification number

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