Rails - Jun 2005 - [OT] Purchasing Rails beta book and CC Verification

Did anyone else who purchased the Rails betabook get a telephone call
from someone at "Humboldt Merchants" (sp?) asking to verify their
purchase, ostensibly to ensure there was no fraud (on the part of the
merchant, not the person buying the book)?

They knew my name, phone number, the title of the book I bought and
the type of credit card I used. They didn''t give or ask for the credit
card number, so it didn''t seem like a scam. Just thought I''d
ask.

- Sean

On Jun 2, 2005, at 1:00 PM, Sean Santry wrote:
> Did anyone else who purchased the Rails betabook get a telephone call
> from someone at "Humboldt Merchants" (sp?) asking to verify their
> purchase, ostensibly to ensure there was no fraud (on the part of the
> merchant, not the person buying the book)?
>
HA! Yes, our receptionist tried to forward a call from Humboldt to  
me. I declined the call because those people annoy the hell out of  
me. They used to call or email us constantly, insisting that by law  
we had to use their services to monitor our ecommerce sites!

Anyway, now that I''ve read this, I asked our receptionist what the  
caller had asked about, and they did in fact ask if I had recently  
purchased the Rails book.
> They knew my name, phone number, the title of the book I bought and
> the type of credit card I used. They didn''t give or ask for the
credit
> card number, so it didn''t seem like a scam. Just thought
I''d ask.
>
> - Sean
> _______________________________________________
> Rails mailing list
> Rails-1W37MKcQCpIf0INCOvqR/iCwEArCW2h5@public.gmane.org
> http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
>

On Jun 2, 2005, at 2:49 PM, David Rose wrote:
> On Jun 2, 2005, at 1:00 PM, Sean Santry wrote:
>
>> Did anyone else who purchased the Rails betabook get a telephone call
>> from someone at "Humboldt Merchants" (sp?) asking to verify
their
>> purchase, ostensibly to ensure there was no fraud (on the part of the
>> merchant, not the person buying the book)?
>>
> HA! Yes, our receptionist tried to forward a call from Humboldt to me. 
> I declined the call because those people annoy the hell out of me. 
> They used to call or email us constantly, insisting that by law we had 
> to use their services to monitor our ecommerce sites!
>
> Anyway, now that I''ve read this, I asked our receptionist what the
> caller had asked about, and they did in fact ask if I had recently 
> purchased the Rails book.
>
>> They knew my name, phone number, the title of the book I bought and
>> the type of credit card I used. They didn''t give or ask for
the credit
>> card number, so it didn''t seem like a scam. Just thought
I''d ask.
>>
These people are the merchant bank who handle our credit card 
processing. Because we had a very high volume or transactions, their 
fraud unit decided to verify that these transactions were valid. They 
did this by calling a random sample of people who''d made a purchase and
verifying that they had indeed made a purchase.

This is actually for your protection: they were checking that we hadn''t
somehow got hold of a large number of credit card numbers and were just 
making charges against them.  By saying "yes, I did receive the PDF" 
you''re letting them know that the transaction was valid.

Sorry for the inconvenience of the call. It''s not something we can 
control, but I''m personally quite glad they do it.


Regards



Dave