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Comment by berberous | Hacker News Reader

From the FAQ: "As an additional safeguard, the Coin app will only allow you to add cards you own."

So it sounds like if the name doesn't match, it won't work (you have to take a picture of the front).

Except that names aren't required to match on credit cards. For instance, my wife is an authorized user on my card. Her signature is on the back, my name is on the front. Similar situations abound for business use cards.

That's strange. My girlfriend is an authorized user on my card in Canada and it has her name on the front and she has her own PIN that I don't know.

We seem to have stronger laws about this sort of thing in place at the moment. In the US, it seems, just swiping the magnetic stripe is still the way it's done. How quaint!

If you're an authorized user on a credit card, you're issued a card in your own name. I'm not sure what you're doing is compliant.

The company card I used had my name on it, as for all other cardholders; and cards with wrong gender are treated in shops as unacceptable if they notice, though in 90% cases they don't, unless if it's a large purchase and they want ID.

And how exactly is this verified? I don't think there's OCR there to verify that it's your card you just snapped a photo of.

The magstripe data has all the name information in it.

Swiping a card passes along the name on the card.

But a waiter doesn't ask for ID when taking your card... so even if the Coin identifies you as John Smith when you pay your check, the fact that you are Steve Jackson who presented the card doesn't mean anything. And you can have multiple cards with multiple names in your Coin.

I believe the coin app will only put cards on the Coin that match the name that is on your account.

Please look at the context of my comment.

Card.io will scan cards and OCR them. Maybe they do something like this to ensure the name matches the registered name on the account? https://www.card.io

Edit: And it's on the magnetic data, too.

Couldn't you technically bypass the OCR by taping a piece of paper with a different name or number over it? Does the magnetic data store the name?

I go by my middle name, but some places have forced me to use my first name, so my cards are a mix of my first+last and middle+last name. So then I would look like two different people to this coin wallet?

Match? How? With OCR and image processing?

Currently, one assumes you can take a picture of any card and store it for visual purposes. There's zero explanation of how they authenticate a physical card (photo) with the swipe data.

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