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June 1, 2006
A Tesco store, a Drunk and a Credit Card - Data Integrity in action
Because I choose to live near Oxford, whilst Datanomic is based in Cambridge, I frequently drive between the two cities in the wee small hours. So it came to be that I was doing some grocery shopping in a Tesco store at 1am one day recently when I noticed a kerfuffle at the checkout.
A man in his early twenties, and clearly worse for wear, was remonstrating with the cashier who had refused to take the credit card he was brandishing as payment. "But I know the PIN" he said, "so why won't you **** take it?"
Nothing the man said, or did, could persuade the cashier to change - she sat there calmly and repeatedly pointed out that the card was issued to a Miss Susan Jones [not the real name] and that in her judgement that meant that it wasn't his.
"It's my girlfriend's" he protested "she gave it to me" and proceeded to call the said girlfriend on his cellphone. I loitered nearby for a while until the cashier was joined by 2 of her colleagues and I was satisfied that she wasn't about to be physically assaulted. By making that simple check of data integrity between the name on the card and the person in front of her, the cashier had prevented a fraudulent act - albeit one that had no victim (assuming the card was indeed the girlfriends and the drunk had her permission to use it).
Meanwhile, I sauntered away to the self-service till where, unsupervised, I scanned and packed my own shopping and then paid for it using my American Express card - a card that is not Chip and Pin. I didn't have to sign a receipt and nobody even looked at my card, let alone checked that it was mine. As I left the store I heard the cashier telling the drunk that the police had been called, because he had refused to let her confiscate the credit card.
There's a lesson in this: if you're a drunk, trying to buy more booze with someone else's credit card - use the self-service till and help yourself!
Applying data integrity checks can help to protect your business, but they're of limited value if you only apply them to a subset of data sources.
Copyright © 2006 Steve Tuck - All Rights Reserved
Posted by Steve Tuck at June 1, 2006 4:00 PM
