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Comment by NaomiLehman | Hacker News Reader

Just a tip - You can put any string as your name for your Apple ID. you can also change it at any time. I have it as Mac Book. It's not checked when making any credit card payment, AFAIK.

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Just keep in mind, if you give your device to the Apple Store for repairs, they'll automatically expect the person who is picking up to have a matching ID to the Apple account.

It was a fun misunderstanding to resolve when I went to pick up my repaired Macbook Pro and they expected my ID to say Mark Suckerberg. It was resolved relatively uneventfully but still had to get the manager over.

Another fun side effect, if you put an emoji in your name, you'll need to manually edit it every time you use Apple pay or it breaks the transaction.

that's hilarious. and why would you put an emoji in your name :D

Is anything but the zip code actually checked ever? Besides the number and cv2 or whatever.

Number, date (though I never bothered to check if it's actually checked, besides stupid frontend shenanigans when I couldn't enter it because it had a whole whooping month ahead of the current date) and CVC.

As soon as I learned what BANK NAME is acceptable name I used it almost everywhere.

I’ve never heard of this. Are you saying I could enter “MyLocal Bank” as the payer name instead of my own when transacting online with a credit card? This seems like the kind of fact that should be essential privacy knowledge if true!

Well, try it. But don't blame if some over zealous merchant would deny you without refund despite receiving you money.

This might not work super well if your package is crossing border either. Sure it's your billing address and not your shipping address, but sometimes they are all the same.

No. Credit card transactions cannot check for name or billing a part from the zip code. Also the zip code validation only works in certain countries like the US, and Canada.

The way to validate that works is Visa 3DS or MasterCard 3D Secure. Those sent an OTP from the issuer to the cardholder on the issuer database, usually an email or SMS. The issuer of the card is the only who really knows the owner of the card.

> Credit card transactions cannot check for name or billing a part from the zip code.

This is not true. Name and address verification is common.

https://corporate.visa.com/en/solutions/acceptance/verificat...

In the US, CA the name is not validated. My company is credit card issuer and authorizer, and we don't do any validation a part from CVC. Maybe some countries/iisuers do the name validation, but is not not common at all.

They get compared yes, and it feeds into the fraud likelihood score that the merchant gets sent. And then usually chooses to ignore, because they make more from going ahead with the transaction than from stopping because it's suspicious, but it makes it easier for the credit card industry to put the liability on them.

Well, for example, I can set Stripe Radar to hard match the name on the CC, for example. Very granular control is possible, but doing stuff like checking zip codes, names leads to false negatives and isn't worth it, in my experience.

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