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Comment by IAmBroom | Hacker News Reader

Related: there is a known scam where someone will ask for payment by things like Ebay gift cards. To "prove you have the card", you are asked to read off just the last few digits of the card - which unbeknownst to the intended victim is actually all that is needed to redeem the card.

You can reliably reconstruct a SSN that is missing the first digits, if you know where the person lived when they filed for it, but that's not the same thing.

Why Ebay built this idiotic weakness into their cards is beyond me.

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> You can reliably reconstruct a SSN that is missing the first digits, if you know where the person lived when they filed for it, but that's not the same thing.

This used to be true, but isn’t for SSNs assigned since I think 2011 - the exact year could be wrong, that’s from memory. Since that switch, the component that used to be geographical is assigned randomly.

A wise move, IMO. The geographic thing made sense, pre-internet: our local office assigns only number that start "477-", and no other office does, so we can control for duplicate assignments.

> Related: there is a known scam where someone will ask for payment by things like Ebay gift cards. To "prove you have the card", you are asked to read off just the last few digits of the card - which unbeknownst to the intended victim is actually all that is needed to redeem the card.

I'm not following. If things have gotten this far, the victim has already been duped into buying the card and intends to send it to the scammers anyway... ?

But also, how could the card possibly work that way? What are the other digits even for; and wouldn't they quickly run out of valid "last few digit" combinations for issued cards?

> I'm not following. If things have gotten this far, the victim has already been duped into buying the card and intends to send it to the scammers anyway... ?

Yes, the mark has essentially fallen for the scam, but not yet arrived for the goods... which don't actually exist.

> But also, how could the card possibly work that way? What are the other digits even for; and wouldn't they quickly run out of valid "last few digit" combinations for issued cards?

Exactly why I hate that Ebay uses their insipid coding schema. I'm not explaining why they do it, because I can't.

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