Hey all, it's been a while

[mlstrm]

Just finding time to sit down and write has been tough enough...it helps that the ban on LJ as a "Social Networking" site has been lifted slightly at work.  Things are going pretty good around here, and the kids are doing great.

My notice of the day:  I heard this story on NPR, which also got distributed to the "weird news" files all around TV and

Comments

[anonymous]

When you divide the total by 5, you get a 16-digit number starting with 4. So far, so good. But that 16-digit number does not have the right Luhn checksum, so, sadly, it's not a card number.

[devjoe]

A couple other theories I saw floated:

Counting the cents, a charge for 2.31 got the stem of somebody's card number (with the last four digits zeroed out, the opposite of the way it is hidden on the statement) attached. This one has the advantage that 4885 is known to be the start of some Visa card numbers issued by Bank of America.

Multiplied by 100 (so it is an integer number of cents; financial systems do this to avoid round-off error in using floating point numbers), and converted to hexadecimal, this becomes 20 20 20 20 20 20 12 50. This looks like a format conversion error, where a number was padded with ASCII space characters (32 decimal = 20 hex) instead of zeroes. This doesn't explain why the number came out to a multiple of $100 (in fact, if we assume it somehow got rounded, it could have started its life as an entire row of spaces) but the sequence of 6 leading spaces is hard to pass off as coincidence.

Neither of these explains how the same unlikely amount was charged to thousands of cardholders.