Re: e-mail forwarding, for-pay remailers

[Rich Graves <llurch@networking.stanford.edu>]

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On Thu, 14 Dec 1995, Jon Lasser wrote:

> On Thu, 14 Dec 1995, Rich Graves wrote:
> 
> > > I suspect Sameer would be happy to open an account paid in advance in
> > > small unmarked bills.  AOL probably wouldn't.
> > 
> > AOL will, however, accept a bogus name, address, and credit card number
> > (as long as the checksum is correct) for the initial ten free hours plus
> > however long it takes for the first bill to bounce. 
> 
> Nope.  Not anymore.  Due to excessive fraud, they now check the credit 
> card information when you first provide it.

They didn't check it very thoroughly last week. I think they just do some
kind of checksum or maybe an assigned-numbers list lookup; it's too fast
to be anything else. 

I signed up using an unsolicited credit card that was canceled before it
was ever activated. If any paper trail remains (I'd be curious to know
whether there is any, but please don't dig too deep), it should lead to a
nonexistent entity living at my work address (a general mail drop that 
is used by 50 different people). 

Of course I fully intend to terminate the AOL account, or less likely
correct the billing information, before the ten free hours runs out. If
they ever care to investigate, they'll find an email message from me to
myself explaining what happened. 

My AOL account names and the credit card number I used are on the Web.

- -rich
 owner-win95netbugs@lists.stanford.edu
 ftp://ftp.stanford.edu/pub/mailing-lists/win95netbugs/
 gopher://quixote.stanford.edu/1m/win95netbugs
 http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~llurch/win95netbugs/faq.html

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