I found a hilarious site where the hosting comedian tries to pass off a VISA signature on his receipt that is clearly not his. It gets pretty outrageous pretty quickly. This happens to be something that I’ve always enjoyed doing just to see if they’ll actually ask for my ID (I’ve never been asked for ID because of a non-matching signature). Here’s some of my favorite snippets from his many adventures:
How crazy would I have to make my signature before someone would actually notice?
Trying something simple:
I tried the old standby, “X.” I was kind of nervous about this one, and had a long story prepared about how I had recently been involved in a motorcycle accident, and during my sixteen months in traction had only been able to sign with an X, a signature which grew on me. At the last minute, I chickened out and added an additional squiggly. I don’t know why I was concerned; I was just buying a beer at Jillian’s.
And the bizarre:
I wrote a song and drew it upon the touch screen with complete musical notation.
And for the finale, ‘NOT AUTHORIZED’
“Well, I recently changed my signature,” I said hopefully. “It now looks a lot like NOT AUTHORIZED.”
“It’s got to match the back of your card,” the manager said.
“Oh,” I said. “No problem.” I took the card back from him and wrote NOT AUTHORIZED on the back of my credit card. I had heard that this trick sometimes works, but this guy was too smart for me.
He also tries to ask security questions to the VISA people on the phone like the inpregnable fortress of knowing your mother’s maiden name or generating a password – here’s a nice snippet of dialogue.
JH: And for security purposes, I have to ask you to create a secret word or pass… [I start to lose it] …passphrase. It can be up to seven characters, and you want to think of something that’s, that’s difficult to guess. For instance, you don’t want to use your birthdate.
JH: Sure. I’m going to go ahead and have our system create a passphrase for you. But go ahead. You do that.
JH: Sure, no problem Nokia. Here’s the passphrase, if you could write this down. It’s capital B, zero, zero, lower-case b, lower-case z, exclamation point, exclamation point. We’ll use that in future communications between us, so please write it down and store it in a secure location.
