PSA About Bank/Card Linked Programs (Don't give away your credit card information)

This post is in response to this comment thread.

This actually scares the shit out of me because I'm shocked at the fact that people are agreeing with the initial statement:

I signed up but was apprehensive they used plaid instead of just me giving them the credit card number. Now I will probably never bother to link a card.

Let's start by thinking logically.

If I give you my card number, expiration, and security code, do you think you'll be able to look at my card history?

Realistically, no. I mean, sure. You can call my bank with my card number and zip code and they can recite your most recent transactions, but on a large scale, it doesn't make sense. How do you view your transactions for your credit card? You probably log onto your bank's website and view them online. That makes sense.

If you ever see a card linked program without the infrastructure in place (such as Empyr or visa local offers), they have no way of properly tracking your purchases and providing rewards. But they do have access to your card number and pin, because who knows how secure their platform really is.

Now let's think about Plaid.

If you're not familiar with Plaid, familiarize yourself. Plaid is used by... uh.. just about everything, tbh. Beermoney wise, it's used by Drop, Pei, Bumped, Acorns, and almost everything else that requires you to link an account.

When you're linking with Plaid, you get the knowledge that you're linking through a secured platform used by millions. When you "link" by giving away your credit card information, who knows where it's actually going, and as far as the user volume, you're probably one of thousnads, or ten thousands, maybe hundred thousands when you're linking with something other than Plaid. So, let's say Plaid gets compromised (it won't, but if it somehow were to be able to) and information of users gets leaked. Now you're one of millions. Think back to equifax. Remember that? Oh boy. The only good news here is how wide-scale it was, that realistically the negative outcomes of that leak was minimized and it had a large corporation and the government behind the solution.

Moving on, someone mentioned somewhere that when linking with Plaid "you are giving up more info for it". This isn't true. For the card linked programs that are talked about on this sub, Plaid is only used to act as a gateway to your transactions. Plaid gives read only access to your transactions. That's all. None of your login credentials are stored anywhere. They part where you sign in and hopefully enter a 2FA code is only in place for the initial authentication.

TL;DR - Don't give away your credit card information directly; plaid is safer.

submitted by /u/Fishering
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/beermoney/comments/ed4xdu/psa_about_bankcard_linked_programs_dont_give_away/