Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992)dir Chris Columbus
That’s why credit cards have embossed digits on the front, is to make a carbon copy in an offline machine like that.
The embossed digits are being phased out, though. I just got a debit card without embossing.
(don’t worry; I was born the year after this movie came out, and I didn’t see one of these machines in use until I was like 25. at a Renaissance Faire. a stall that had lost power was using it as a backup for their Square reader)
I thought I would find out what it was when I grew up then I grew up and they didn’t exist
We had one of these at my job in case of power outages. I’m sure they have a fancy name like “imprinter” or something, but everyone I know just called it the Kerchunker.
The Card Verification Value, the 3 non-embossed numbers on the back, was introduced once online consumer purchasing using just the numbers and not the physical card handed to a clerk got big, such that the hundreds of carbon copies of your 12-digit number floating around the knees of every minimum-wage clerk in the city were no longer sufficient by themselves
I’m uh, not sure why this wasn’t prominent enough to force the issue in the catalog era, maybe retailers bore more fraud prevention weight in-house. I remember that into the 90s big department store chains still offered their own charge cards with store credit, they must have had their own systems for calibrating that. Gambling debts aren’t legally enforceable so Vegas today maintains its own credit rating system for giving out markers (and back in the day that’s why they had Mob enforcers to break guys’ knees)
