I once was in a charity sponsored therapy group and they had a $10 fee. I was annoyed as this was a pretty wealthy organization and the fee seemed discriminatory, or at least a hassle. I learned that it was just there to validate each participant.
So I think this is just a filter to help reduce bot spam.
Also there is number of services like privacy.com that allow to hide real card details. And even if person is using real card then payment process have absolutely no way of knowing anything except those few last numbers of the card.
Bypassing credit card checks for botting as easy as any other protections.
Also most payment processors provide some sort of key that lets you identify if two users entered the same credit card number, for example Stripe[1]. So you’re not limited to last four digits for checking if two cards are the same.
[1]: https://stripe.com/docs/api/cards/object#card_object-fingerp...
Spammers do have large number of unique phones in their farms as well as budget to have undetectible rooting and hardware ID faking. And Google Pay / Apple Pay as well as majority of banks actually do nothing to prevent you from adding your cards to 10 different phones.
Of course it's all makes lives harder for everyone who want to get a new account, but nothing including literal ID / passport and face verification make is impossible to bypass.
This is just plain wrong.
1. Payment processors know everything because they process the payment
2. Application developers don't know anything besides the last 4 is closer to reality because they're probably not PCI compliant to access the remaining information. BUT some processors such as Adyen will try to provide a unique identifier for each card (that has no further information except linking multiple purchases across vendors and channels).
Now with this unique identifier X still wouldn't know WHO you are but they could provide that information to advertisers that might know or at least use it to track you online and in person
They know all the information you given, but in practice they can't even verify "name on the card" that you entered in most of countries. In some countries they can check your billing address ZIP code, but that's all about it.
And there absolutely no way for them to find out if you are unique user with one card or you just have 10 cards for the same credit account or created 10 supplimentary cards for all your family and the dog.
Also, having a fraudulent Apple Pay account is pretty rare and requires an entire apple account. That can be shut down if shenanigans.
My original point is that having a credit card greatly reduces the anonymity of accounts and allows for greater ability to trace back to the user. Both for uniqueness (ie, does prepend front 500 twitter accounts?) and for legal reasons (eg, prepend just did a crime, let’s find out who prepend is).
This doesn’t mean people can’t get around it. It means most people can get around it.
Do people on HN actually think this will work? I'm genuinely curious. Knowing everything we know about the underground economy of sockpuppets, bots and carders - combined the (un)willingness of real people (especially in relatively poorer countries) to pop out their credit card during signup for a social media site - do folks really think this will produce a high-quality stream of new signups?
It just will not solve the problem he's trying to solve. It will reduce low-effort and out-of-box tooling, but it'll also increase the value of successful networks, which will encourage better tooling and cover the mule costs.
It's going to give him real name, street address, and zip/postal code for these users; for a company that makes most of its money off ads, that's absolutely money-making.
Given the current policy around blue tick (which is full of crypto bot and onlyfan sex workers, without any reaction from Musk whatsoever) I doubt it will have any effect.
Also, World of Warcraft servers are full of bots, despite needing to pay to create and keep an account, so again it doesn't bode well.
It's a non-issue
And of course a lot of them have the same X logo or Elon's picture, because His Xcellence probably fired the thinking heads dealing with spam