I remember when Verizon phone booths in the US started accepting the credit cards, for a while they would accept any 16-digit number with a valid IIN that passed the Luhn check.
Toronto’s parking meter boxes were like this. They just had GPRS so they’d do an overnight dump (possibly a part of their data deal with the telecom back when data was actually saturated during the day).
So people were using cancelled or empty prepaid visa/mastercards.
Initially they’d just push out blacklists.
Once they really caught on, they did a firmware upgrade to do online verification and it took fooooreeeeveeeeerrrrr to do a credit card purchase.
