Originally published at: Xitter to charge $1 to new users in identity verification play | Boing Boing
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Maybe this strand of spaghetti will stick to the wall!
Charging a small one-time user fee to discourage bots and spammers and drive-by tr0lls can work in a limited way on community sites, but I doubt it will play out that way at Elon’s Nazi bar and snake oil emporium. I suspect his ultimate purpose here is collecting CC numbers to incorporate into the future Twitter “everything app” he’s talked about.
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Would not touch it with yours.
Seriously, letting that sleazy scumbag have your financials? Has to be when the penny drops for a significant portion of people still drinking in the Nazi bar oblivious to the paraphernalia adorning their fellow drinkers.
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“Anonymous Reloadable Debit Card”
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Sure, credit card processing and other fees will probably eat up a lot of that dollar, but still, anyone who tells you they need your credit card number just to verify your identity is definitely scamming you.
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Given all the bots paying $8 / month, what’s $1 / year going to do to stop them?
This doesn’t stop fraud at all.
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Theoretically at least, Xitter could see that hundreds of bot accounts were paid for with the same card and ban them.
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Anyone serious wouldn’t be that stupid, they’re using stolen cards
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… to be leaked through Xitter’s (likely) extremely porous security to the first attacker who sneezes at it. How confident do you feel that they have the necessary knowledge or experience to securely manage financial data?
Cue the first notification of a security breach (said notification to come from a 3rd party, not Xitter) in about half an hour after they enact this policy.
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It IS the basic “free rider” problem. Economists and sociologists should be happy!
But I’m not going to pay for that crap anyway.
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I’m not sure the exact mechanism being used; but payment processors generally claim to be able to distinguish prepaid cards from ‘standard’ ones.
If this is a bot hunt it wouldn’t be terribly surprising if they’ll refuse the more expendable cards.
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I haven’t tried it in a while, but some credit card companies will generate one-time numbers. (Though these might be identifiable as such, too.)
Hypothetical because I wouldn’t pay Twitter for anything. In fact they need to pay me for thinking about them. Debit cards are ok.
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That site should have died months ago. By all means, Musk, continue your weird social experiment to see what it will finally take to drive away your last users, advertisers and employees (even if you’re too dumb to realize that’s what you’re doing.) I’m really curious how much abuse it will take to finally wake them up.
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Pretty sure you just described almost everyone signing up for Xitter accounts these days. Well, those and Nazis.
Gosh, what else could they possibly use? Some sort of “verification system” like the one they, um, got rid of?
This really does seem like the most inept attempt by Musk yet to create the “X” “everything app” of his dreams. Like he’s expecting users to say, “Well, they already have my credit card information, so I might as well use it for financial services I don’t need or want.”
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In other words - register your bots before he starts charging!
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…already successful efforts…
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Now all Elon needs to do is convince 44 Billion people to sign up and he’ll be back in the black!
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I’d trust George Santos with my debit card number before I’d hand it over to Elno.
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A Guardian writer reached the same conclusion.
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The first four digits on a card number tell you Mastercard, visa, corporate (of either) or whatever other system you have. My Revolut (kind of Venmo type thing) card number has a different four digit code from the disposable online card I can create on that account so they should know what your card is.
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