The jokes on us... All of us.

The below was posted on my personal site 02/16/2007

1. LillianVernon.com teams up with WebLoyalty.com to scam their customers into signing up for a worthless $10.00 per month membership.

They do this by giving your credit card information to a third party without your permission and what appears to be a conflict of their merchant bank agreements.

2. In other news... Visa and Mastercard respond to credit card fraud by creating the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard. A set of rules governing what steps merchants must take to protect account information.

3. In other news... ScanAlert.com was selected by Visa International to be the exclusive provider of Visa-branded PCI / AIS validation services in over 70 countries.

4. ScanAlert also provides a service to online retailers by which they "test" websites to make sure they are "Hacker Safe" and in their words: "...guard your information..." Retailers that sign up get to display the Hacker Safe logo.

5. So its a bit puzzling why ScanAlert.com allows LillianVernon.com to display the Hacker Safe logo.

I'm not making this up. LillianVernon.com gives out your credit card information knowingly to a third party without your permission which appears to be against Visa's own rules, yet the company in charge of PCI validation selected by Visa gives LillianVernon.com a thumbs up for guarding your information.