How does a candidate raise $650 million dollars and $150 million in one month? He cheats of course. New evidence is emerging that the Obama camp has deliberately disabled the address verification feature for all of their credit card transactions. Normally, when you go to Amazon.com or some place and try to purchase an item, Amazon will ask for your CC# and your address, then they run a check to verify that the card# you are using matches that card’s # of record. Ace of Spades reports that credit card companies typically do not let companies disable this feature, and it can only be done deliberately:

Having worked for companies that process credit cards online, it is necessary to go through and manually disable the safeguards that they put in place to verify a person’s address and zip code with the cardholder’s bank. But international banks don’t currently have the same safeguards that banks in the US have, which also works in the One’s favor.

So most likely they’ve disabled the necessary safeguards for US cards which their merchant bank would be angry about if they found out since it exposes them to risk, as well as international cards which is an even greater risk because there’s no way to verify the information electronically for most countries, so they could just say they’re in the US with phony info and the card will still process online. The One could then just claim that they said they were from America.

Senator Clinton’s website worked with a reputable company that had the same safeguards in place for her online donations, seems like someone just doesn’t like to play by the rules that credit card companies have put in place.

Is there a legitimate reason to disable the AVS system? Apparently not:

Visa/MC banks hate it when merchants blow off AVS, as it increases the risk of chargebacks (which are a hassle/expense for the bank to handle). Consequently they demand a much higher discount rate to take cards with AVS-overrides.

If a merchant’s chargeback rate goes above 1% the banks will wallop the merchant with research fees. Merchants with high chargeback rates (like porn sites) can end up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra monthly fees in order to be able to continue to accept cards, on top of huge discounts on each transaction.

If you think this is exaggeration, I would invite you to try it yourself, but I wouldn’t want anyone donating money to this scam artist. However, here are several testimonials of people who have tried to donate:

Frankly, its easier than I’d believe to do this. Courtesy of my (real) CC number and expiration date, the Obama campaign has just received a $19.45 donation from mister Adolf Hitler, whose occupation is “Dictator” at the company “National Socialist Party of Ger” (I got cut off). I captured screenshots to prove this.

No verification required. The listed address wasn’t even close to my real address.

Good to know that Obama is taking donations from Adolf Hitler, he truly is a post-racial candidate! What is even more frightening, is that apparently the Obama web page AVS system is also designed to take credit cards issued in foreign countries.

At Hot Air:

I have a credit card issued by a bank in Hong Kong.

I’ve just made 5 donations of $5 each using the card. I listed fake addresses in North Korea, Iran, Gaza, Venezuela and Kenya. The names and addresses were made up, each was different, I listed real Yahoo email addresses that forward to me.

Fake Name
Not A. Realperson
Finance Violation
Fraudulent Charge
Over Donation Limit

All 5 went through without a problem. I’m already being solicited for more money.

The truly frightening consequences of this is that anyone from anywhere in the world can contribute money to the Obama campaign, which is a violation of federal campaign finance law. Suddenly his world tour this summer makes more sense, he was trying to garner cash.

Just for fun, some bloggers also tried this same trick over at the McCain campaign web page. However, McCain actually has his AVS turned on, so the credit card transaction was denied. Maybe this explains why McCain is running behind in the polls, his unwillingness to cheat and bend the rules. After all, if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying and its not cheating unless you get caught. With the main stream media covering for Obama it’s easy to not get caught, because they don’t seem to know how to do any investigative journalism any longer.