The Obama campaign made the following stupid statement in a Washington Post article
The Obama team’s disclosures came in response to questions from The Washington Post about the case of Mary T. Biskup, a retired insurance manager from Manchester, Mo., who turned up on Obama’s FEC reports as having donated $174,800 to the campaign. Contributors are limited to giving $2,300 for the general election.
Biskup, who had scores of Obama contributions attributed to her, said in an interview that she never donated to the candidate. “That’s an error,” she said. Moreover, she added, her credit card was never billed for the donations, meaning someone appropriated her name and made the contributions with another card.
When asked whether the campaign takes steps to verify whether a donor’s name matches the name on the credit card used to make a payment, Obama’s campaign replied in an e-mail: “Name-matching is not a standard check conducted or made available in the credit card processing industry. We believe Visa and MasterCard do not even have the ability to do this.
“Instead, the campaign does a rigorous comprehensive analysis of online contributions on the back end of the transaction to determine whether a contribution is legitimate.”
For you folks that don’t accept credit card payments, if you want the cheaper processing rate, you must provide the name on the card in addition to other required tidbits. You of course can opt for a much higher rate and therefore only take the number (with some companies).
The statement that “We believe Visa and MasterCard do not even have the ability to do this” is utter crap and just another example of the black sheep pulling the wool over your eyes just before he mugs you.
