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Anonymous Threatens Robin Hood Attacks Against Banks
gManZboy writes "Just in time for the holidays, hacktivist collective Anonymous has announced that it has teamed up with like-minded group TeaMp0isoN to donate to charity. The catch: they're using stolen credit data from big banks to make donations, in a campaign they're calling Operation Robin Hood. Is the #OpRobinHood campaign for real, or like previous threats against Wall Street and Facebook, just another hoax? Aesthetically, at least, the OpRobinHood video ticks all of the traditional Anonymous aesthetic requirements: a mashed-up 'p0isoaNoN' logo (green on black), a liberal dose of swelling choral music (via that movie trailer staple 'Europa,' by Globus), together with selected clips of Kevin Costner as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves."
OK, so banks get screwed, but charities get screwed too. Unless they're "donating" to the RIAA charity fund, this seems pretty evil in itself.
People who frauded entire world by selling water vapor through deriving assets to 60x their value and then lending 10 times nonexistent cash over them are still sitting pretty and posting record bonuses and profits. Thats 599 times nonexistent cash lent as loans to governments, megacorps, factories, organizations, whereas there was only 1 unit of asset to back them. the correct amount of lending should have been 10x at maximum.
To simply put it in streetspeak - these people engaged in cash fraud. And they are drinking champagne in wall street. world suffers through their fraud. at this state noone can persuade me that what anonymous doing is wrong.
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is bringing up that terrible Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves movie. That's unforgivable.
So, they want to steal peoples' credit card info and use that to donate those peoples' money to charities. Then the banks have to reimburse the people whose info was stolen. There are a lot of things wrong with this. First off, for those people whose info gets stolen, they are out money until the banks go through the process of reimbursing them. With the numbers of people that would be affected by this, that could take a while. So, people will be short of cash at a time when they need it most: the holidays. This is not going to endear people to their cause. Also, what is going to happen to this data? I really doubt it's going to be deleted. Remember, Anonymous can be anyone. This information will end up for sale on black market sites. You should not be breaking the law and endangering innocent people/invading their privacy just because you don't like the bank. They are really showing themselves to be no better than the banks themselves; they are taking other peoples' money and doing whatever they want with it that servers their purpose, regardless of the consequences.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Someone needs a lesson in credit card merchant agreements.
Wait till the charities they give to start getting their transaction fees raised or processing frozen for astoundingly high chargeback and fraudulent transaction rates. I'm sure they'll really enjoy that.
Big win.
If they send the money to honest charities like Oxfam, Unicef or Médecins Sans Frontières, they will probably just re-credit the transferred money back to the bank. And if they use some less scrupulous charity, well, that charity shouldn't be getting money in the first place. In any case, there's no real win here.
What would be really cool, though, is if Visa (to demonstrate their unbreachable security) set out a Hack-for-Oxfam challenge, in which any money that hackers manage to route to Oxfam would be stay with them and be considered a charitable donation from Visa. It would be great free publicity if the hackers failed, and a very good deed would be done if the hackers succeeded - plus, they could patch the exploited security holes.
The wealth disparity isn't between the middle class and the poor, its between the rich and everyone else. Stealing from the middle class just creates new poor.
All of the charities will end up paying out big bucks in chargeback fees. It is the merchants that are on the hook for credit card fraud. They'll be forced to return the money and pay a chargeback fee ($30 or more). They will end up doing more damage than any potential (and misguided) good.
I'm sorry, I don't understand how you think taking money from the middle class and giving it to the poor fixes anything. Corporations and the upper-class have more than enough to be able to bring the poor out of the danger zone and still remain wealthy. The middle class, by and large, did not get there by doing anything other than working their asses off and getting paid salaries proportionate to their work. Whereas the upper class more often than not are getting paid money that is vastly beyond what the rest of society considers appropriate for the work they do. CEO of a company that fired 10,000 people last year and lost $5 billion? Earn a severance package of $100 million. Gamble with other people's money on the market and send $500 billion up in smoke? Get a $2 million bonus.
The point is to help the people at the bottom. You know, the ones who are homeless, living on scraps they fish out of the trash of idiots like you who don't give a damn about anybody but yourself.
What the fuck are you on about? I pay my taxes and I donate to charity when I feel like it. I assure you I'm far from the 1% the Occupy people are always talking about (otherwise I wouldn't have a one and a half hour commute, both ways, every day).
This operation is talking about taking money from stolen credit cards and donating it to charity. Let's disect that a bit.
First, you're stealing people's livelihoods. Credit cards are often attached to bank accounts. You could be bankrupting people, or putting them in a state where they can't pay their bills. I have a problem with that from the get-go. But it gets worse.
When the fraudulent transaction goes through, the banks will take an interchange fee averaging about 2% of the transaction value straight from the top before the charity even gets it. So the banks are already laughing their asses off at this plan, since what Occupy thinks is going to hurt them is going to GIVE THEM MONEY.
So when the unfortunate person owning the credit card sees that they've had their money stolen, they're going to try a chargeback. Their bank may refuse this, but especially if it's a credit card, they'll likely get their money back. In the middle of this, the bank will likely take a chargeback fee from the charity since they'd have a hard time taking it from the person who's had their money stolen.
Now, in this circumstance there are likely to be a large number of chargebacks against the charity, which may further increase their liability:
Currently both Visa and Mastercard require all merchants to maintain no more than 1% of dollar volume processed to be chargebacks. If the percentage goes above, there are fines starting at $5000 – $25,000 to the merchant's processing bank and ultimately passed on to the merchant.
All of that money goes to the banks and the credit card companies.
So what's the final score here?
Victim: Either has their money back after losing it for potentially several days, or if they're unfortunate, has simply lost their money entirely.
Charity: Probably doesn't have much extra money after most people chargeback their fraudulent transactions.
Banks: Got around 2% of every single transaction involved here, more in the cases of chargebacks. Stole money from both the target and the charity without being culpable for any of it.
I'd say I was shocked that nobody thought of this, but it completely matches with everything else Occupy has done: sitting on their asses, breaking the law when convenient to them, proposing no actual solutions, and splitting their focus in a million different directions without putting any real effort into a single one.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
No, you're factually and provably wrong. I suspect that you know this, and are lying in hopes of scaring members of the middle class away from any policies that might fix the distribution of wealth in this country.
The bottom 80% of Americans, a group that includes both the poor and the middle class, owns just 7% of the wealth in the country. Redistributing that 7% evenly among the 250 million people that make up the bottom 80% won't do a damn thing.
a) In the USA credit card issuers (issuing bank, not the interchange network) are liable for fraudulent transactions, losing 100% of the amount (as the customer will not pay, usually) is a loss to the bank even if they win 2-3% interchange.
b) They will chargeback to charities many of the fraudulent transactions which occur card-not-present (i.e. internet payments), so the charities won't get much or any of it. I don't know if there are any additional fees which may actually hurt the charity.
c) if a particular merchant, like a charity, seems to attract a significant amount of fraud, the issuing banks may start to notice it and block payments from all cardholders, hurting the charity's normal fundraising.
d) if a particular merchant, like a charity, seems to attract a significant amount of fraud, then that charity's bank (acquirer) is likely to drop its credit-card processing agreement, disrupting the charity's normal fundraising. There may even be some penalties if they do not have a sufficiently up-to-date website and on-line fraud detection software/procedures.
I work professionally in some aspect of credit card software (at a tech company and not a bank).
In sum, this proposed action is likely to create some extra work for bank employees, though it will probably not cause financially significant losses as many online transactions (not processing with "Secured by Visa" or MC's similar procedure) can be charged back. Charities are unlikely to benefit. They may be harmed.
Yeah, but you think the rich are going to lose money over this?
The insurance companies pay. Guess where that extra money comes from? Yes, it comes from everyone. If the insurance premium goes up for banks. banks go and raise their fees, affecting everyone (especially the poor).
Thinking the rich will be hurt by this is just like thinking a credit card company will be hurt by all the chargebacks.
In fact, this op can go against the very people they're trying to help! If the charities get hit with chargebacks, that's a TON of extra paperwork they have to handle (they are probably not equipped to handle it), plus loss of the money (and maybe a little bit extra transaction fee). So now the charity is out the donation and had to have volunteers deal with the bank rather than work on charitable work.
Even though charities get special rates to handle credit cards (often no transaction fees), the extra paperwork involved still takes time and energy away from doing the charitable work.
Ever heard of the civil rights movement? They cause change without ousting politicians or using force. It's called civil disobedience, and it's proved effective time and time again.
You have it exactly backwards. The civil rights movement succeeded when *voters* decided it would be an electoral issue. The viet nam war ended when *voters* decided it would be an electoral issue, and that decision was made when their lives were affected (increased casualties hitting the middle class) not because of radical anti-war protesters. The true currency of politics are votes not money, money is only useful when the voters are indifferent.
By making ourselves heard (me included) Occupy is waking people up from their fantasy land where government and corporations aren't screwing us.
All Occupy is on a path to do is create a perception of civil unrest and scare the swing voters into going republican, just like the radical anti-war protesters did during the viet nam war resulting in getting nixon elected. Occupy needs to realize that "camping" is going to backfire. Show up, protest, yell and shout, day or night, but when you tire go home or get a room ... repeat as necessary. The more the focus is on "camping" the more the middle will feel that Occupy does not represent them. Polls are showing that this is already happening. In the minds of many Occupy is looking more and more like the "professional protesters" that show up at G20, World Bank, and other meetings. Continue on this path if you wish to waste a great opportunity.