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Comment by dvtrn | Hacker News Reader

Heck, you didn’t even necessarily need a credit card in the earliest of days, when AOL (as well as EarthLink and CompuServe in fact) still let you pay using bank routing details. As long as the routing number was tied to a bank the service could lookup, it would take whatever account number you gave it and you were on the web!

I won’t say how I learned this, but maybe the context clues will fill you in on how it ended when six months into discovering the internet for the first time, my family got a visit from the local PD and some gentlemen from “a government office down state”.

I was 13 at the time. Not much came out it but some very strong words from a local magistrate, who ultimately showed clemency and dropped the affair with orders that I remain “off the web” for a year.

My father on the other hand…was not so eager to let that one go, heh.

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I was in a similar situation in the mid 90's when I was 13 and wanted to get online but wasn't allowed to. I ended up finding a loophole in where if I launch the Prodigy installer from the CD, it would dial up to the Internet to get a local list of servers. I found that I could minimize the full screen installer and could use Internet for about 10 minutes before it kicked me off. I could only do this when my parents were not around and I had to constantly run a long telephone cable to their room and unplug their phone as that was the nearest jack. That worked for good while. :)

Got tired of burning through free trial AOL CD's and decided to "borrow" the username and password from Windows 95 Dial up networking provider at local high school.

Went home and war dialed that local prefix (next city over) until I found the carrier number.

I was 14 and it was 25 years ago

My story was being a 10 year old in the mid-90s and dialing up the Apogee BBS using a number displayed in some shareware game's splashscreen. Turns out that hour-long call to Garland Texas (from Toronto) resulted in a really hefty phone bill, which I was asked to help out with since I had a paper route at the time.

I learned a similar lesson about the difference between LATAs and area codes around the time AOL went to unlimited.

All of the Toledo numbers were constantly busy, so I tried other "local" numbers and ended up discovering that the Findlay number would usually answer. I set that as the default and thought nothing more of it, while all of us used it for hours a day.

The phone bill that arrived at the end of the month was quite large.

> I was 13. Not much came out it but some very strong words from a local magistrate, who ultimately they showed clemency.

Same thing happened to a friend. After that, I got into music and developed a more "healthy" approach to the internet... using it to learn about synthesizers and download the occasional cracked plugin.

Back in the 90s, gas station pump receipts still printed the full credit card number on them. Usually when you found one left behind, it was a corporate gas card that was useless.

But occasionally you'd find someone who left behind their Visa or Mastercard number.

Even in the early 2000s this was a thing in some places. I remember working at a store that printed the full CC# on the customer's receipt. As an employee, it would've been ridiculously easy to steal credit card information. You could just print a second copy of the receipt after the customer left.

This was especially workable in small towns, even back then you still need the zip code to pass validation, which small towns usually only have one of.

It actually went the other way with AOL. In the early days you could use generated credit card numbers and account would last up to a week. Then they started checking numbers so everyone switched to fake bank accounts. Those accounts typically lasted 2-5 days.

The rent payment portal my apartment uses still checks bank accounts this way.

I know this because of the late charges I incurred due to a typo on the account number that the system accepted.

Reminds me of Hackers (the movie)

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