Kevin Hart is doing a series of commercials for Chase Freedom credit cards. In one of them, you clearly see on camera what is supposedly his credit card with the number easily readable.
Obviously this is not Hart’s real credit card number. But I wondering why they seemed to make a point of having the number on camera. It would have been easy to film the commercial so the number wasn’t visible.
This makes me wonder if the number might be more than a normal inactive number. I’m wondering if the company has set it up so that when people try to use that number (and you know some people will) it sends a special alert.
The first six digits simply identify the issuer. There are a lot of nonsensical sequences there for use as a dummy number like the 555 prefix in fictional phone numbers.
That’s what I’m wondering. Is the number in this ad just a generic fake number (like a 555 telephone number) or is it a special trap number set up with the knowledge that it will be seen by millions of people?
BTW, here’s the ad. The expiration date is visible, but the CVV number isn’t (not surprisingly, as most cards put that on the reverse side of the card).
That’s one thing that’s weird. I’ve encountered places online where I didn’t have to enter the CVV, and even occasionally places where I don’t have to include the name, only entering a five digit ZIP Code. I can’t remember if I’ve always had to include the expiration date, but a lot of those seem easy to guess–more than I would expect by chance are December in the next year or two.
Anyway, here’s my educated guess, speaking as an advertising guy:
Someone involved in the ad (maybe someone at the ad agency, maybe someone with Chase) decided that showing a blank card (with no number or other information on it) looked too “phony,” and they wanted to emphasize the idea* that Hart is an actual cardholder.
I suspect that it’s just an invalid number (as noted, the middle eight numbers are in numerical order), and isn’t a specific “trap” to identify people attempting fraud. But, hey, I may be incorrect.
The six number prefix for Chase cards is 441711. So, unless the advertisers used a prefix for some other bank with a code just one digit off (unlikely) then the number is entirely fake and invalid.
Out of curiosity I went to a BIN lookup site and it appears that 441711 and 441712 prefixes both belong to Chase, so that part is right. However the Mod10 check digit at the end is wrong, so that number would be thrown out immediately as a typo and invalid even before authorization was attempted.
This is related to what I was going to suggest. If you are curious about a credit card number in an advertisement, there are syntax verification sites that will check how the number is formed, to see if it’s even constructed correctly. They’re not making a call to a credit service to determine if it’s a real card, they’re just evaluating the internal logic of the number to see if it could be a real card.
You can also use these services to generate a real-but-fake number to give phone scammers you’re messing with, if you’re so inclined. If you just make up a random number, they’ll know it’s fake because it fails this validation, even without trying to make a purchase with it. But if you have a validly constructed number, even if it’s phony, they’ll probably accept it. (These generators are used in payment systems testing, to ensure the embedded validators are working correctly.)
They chose to do both in this commercial. They show Hart holding a card with a number on it. But at the end of the commercial, they show a card again and this time it’s a card with his name on it but no number.
I don’t see what the point of that would be. It wouldn’t serve any purpose. Rather, it’s highly likely that some person somewhere with too much time at their hand would try that number out of simple boredom - it’s easy to do that, any random online shop or media outlet with a paywall will do. So if some kind of alert had been set up, it’s likely that it would have been triggered at least once already, but I don’t see what Amex would be supposed to do after receipt of such an alert.
Here is Cecil Adams’ take on Charles Frost, the above-mentioned Ogily advertising executive whose name appeared for many years on sample credit cards in Amex ads.
As for telephone numbers, the NANP originally set aside the 555 prefix in all area codes for use in fiction; that’s why phone numbers on TV shows are often of that format. To my understanding, this does not apply as a general rule anymore; in some area codes, some 555 numbers have been allocated, so the use of this prefix alone does not guarantee that the number doesn’t exist. For credit card numbers there is, to my knowledge, no such block set aside in its entirety, but since the numbers use a check sum algorithm, it’s easy to make up one that can, mathematically, not possibly exist.
I have to admit, I don’t see the obvious point of it either. But the commercial seemed to be going out of its way to show viewers the number when it could so easily have been avoided. So I considered the possibility that they were intentionally showing the number with the awareness some viewers would try to use it. I just couldn’t see a reason why. Which is why I started this thread.
Point taken. My impression is they didn’t put much effort into making up the number - it’s simply Chases’s issuer identifier (4417), followed by the dull sequence 12345678, followed by the year 2018 which is also the year of issuance, as stated on the same card. It looks like someone at Chase was asked (in 2018) to give the producers of the ad a fake credit card number to put on a prop and spent about two seconds to come up with this. But it is interesting to see that the sample card at the very end of the ad has Hart’s name (with the first name initialled, however) but no number.
The latest debit card from my bank received about six months ago has everything on the back, card number, CVV, and expiration. Makes it handy when ordering online.
They went from embossed to printed numbers some years before that. Perhaps it lets them do everything in one pass.
You can google “dummy credit card numbers” and get a list of fake numbers. Merchants use them for training purposes. They are close enough to the real thing that the merchant’s software will accept them. As long as you don’t actually try to authorize a charge, you can use them for wherever the software wants a card number. So you can train new employees how to use the credit card system, without endangering anyone’s credit rating.
Interestingly, one of the fields returned from the BIN database for 441711 and 441712 is “Luhn = Yes”, meaning that the mod10 check digit is used. I’m virtually certain that it must be used for all VISA numbers since they all have to be compatible, but not necessarily for other payment systems.
