I was at dinner with the kid and it was time to pay. When I was pulling out my credit card she asked if she could see it for a minute.  I handed it to her so that she could get a good look at it.

“You’re not going to memorize those numbers are you?” I joked.

“No,” she said, either missing the joke or just pressing on. “Why is there a bird on it?”               

It was the holographic bird that started appearing on Visa cards years ago. I told her about how they were first put on the cards as a countermeasure to help show salespeople in stores that the card was not counterfeit. The holograph was only of limited usefulness because most clerks didn’t care.

I then told her about how the magnetic stripe could also easily be reprogrammed with someone else’s number so that you could buy anything you wanted, and the other person would get charged for it.*

She got a gleam in her eye and said: “That would be a good thing to do to Elon Musk.”

That surprised me, mostly because she’s 8. But I thought about it and agreed that provided he doesn’t pay too much attention to his bill when it come in that a person could probably skim a couple hundred dollars a month. You just can’t get greedy.

*Of course I would never endorse stealing from individuals. Not only is it illegal, the risks and consequences outweigh any temporary benefit. Plus there’s been enough technological advancement over the years that the methods I told her about would no longer work the majority of the time.