[itsagavin]

As a young man I spent lots of energy collecting and trading stolen credit cards on IRC. A large amount of what I was doing with them was carding local shell accounts so that I could avoid long distance charges by telnetting in to Compuserve and Genie. I of course carded my accounts there as well. I was hooked on an online airplane game and mechwarrior type arena game and still fondly look back on both those experiences. As you can imagine someone on that path without guidance life didn't go so hot and I still every now and then wish I could man a turret in a b17 on an airfield run and enjoy the simpler times.

[pram]

I remember a lot of (porn) sites early on would accept credit card numbers from a generator. Didn’t even need a real one! Of course they’d later close the account for fraud when it wouldn’t bill but it was a surprising amount of places that didn’t actually validate anything beyond the digits being Visa or Mastercard etc.

[cobertos]

How interesting! I wonder what happened behind the scene to require this. Companies in spaces like that usually require specific merchant banks that are willing to deal with "high risk" (or so seemed to be the search term). I wonder if this had advantages in bank selection or how it looked to the banks? Or perhaps a technical limitation?

[disintegore]

Oh, the memories. There was a guy in my RuneScape clan who was known for doing exactly that. Walked me through setting up a vHost and bouncer on a shell account at one time so that I could be 1337 like him, or get us logins for obscure adult sites and say "use a SOCKS proxy, the other ones aren't any good".

He was like the cool older brother we never had. Hope he's alright now. Probably a major factor behind me choosing this career.

[tspike]

Oh man.. I miss Air Warrior and Cyberstrike.

[dustrider]

Airwarrior and Battletech Solaris. Man those were good times.

[mh-]

Air Warrior was absolutely incredible for its time. I played it through AOL, if I recall.

[threeio]

I support and mirrored your actives as a youth.

[papageek]

#phreak by any chance? /MrPruple