Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?
- Reference: 1737361934
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/01/20/who_me/
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This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Rufus," who once worked for a midsized UK retail chain that offered credit accounts to its customers.
To test the website that customers used to manage those accounts, and the backend apps, the retailer created test accounts that Rufus and his colleagues could use to run dummy transactions.
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Those accounts had names like "Mr Test Account Six" and their address was always listed as the retailer's HQ where Rufus worked. Transactions made using the test accounts weren’t ever processed as real orders. But each of the accounts did have a real credit limit.
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"We had to remember not to order anything expensive," Rufus wrote, because if the test accounts exceeded their credit limits, they couldn’t make more purchases.
This arrangement mostly worked well until the day a letter landed on Rufus's desk, addressed to "Mr Test Account Six." He opened it and learned that the account was in arrears and Mr Six must pay ASAP.
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"How we laughed in the office," Rufus wrote, as he and his colleagues were both pleased that their apps worked and amused that a test account was receiving snail mail.
[5]Life lesson: Don't delete millions of accounts on the same day you go to the dentist
[6]Brackets go there ? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken
[7]Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work
[8]Panic at the Cisco tech, thanks to ancient IOS syntax helper that outsmarted itself
In coming weeks, more letters demanding Mr Six pay up arrived, each causing more mirth.
One day, Mr Six's account inexplicably disappeared from the system.
Rufus learned that ignoring the payment demands meant that Mr Six’s account had been removed from the system. All other delinquent accounts were also removed, and a debt-collection company had arrived on the scene.
A quick primer on how this often works: Debt collection companies buy debt and the right to collect it. A hypothetical telco with $100 million of outstanding debt might sell it to a debt collector for $50 million. The telco quickly gets cash they can’t be bothered chasing any more. The debt collector then goes after the $50 million and has the right to collect the full $100 million. Such companies are therefore notorious for sometimes acting in ways that those who owe money find rather unsettling.
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Clearly, Rufus and his colleagues should have taken things more seriously.
That hit home when they realized the debt collection company had Mr Six's address – in their office.
That little fact meant that the tech team's amusement turned to fear that burly chaps carrying baseball bats could appear at any moment, demand to meet Mr Six and make life unpleasant until he was produced.
"Thankfully the credit team sorted things out with the debt collection company," Rufus recalled. "No debt collectors turned up, and we got a new Mr Six account."
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You hit that one out of the park!
For those right ponders, I think it translates as that they were coming to knock Rufus for 6.
Bats..
Oh, we right ponders do know what baseball and it related equipment is and some of us even play it, in spite of the rather insular view of the "World" in the "World Series" which is nothing like as broad as Soccer's World Cup.
And, TBH, anybody arriving at your location with only the tool for hitting a hard speherical object without the rest of the sport's paraphernalia is almost invariably bad news..
> For those stumped right ponders, I think it translates as that they were coming to knock Rufus for 6.
FTFY
Rather sounds like someone committed fraud by selling a debt that didn't exist.
One wonders how much the debt collectors paid for it, whether they got a refund, and whether there were any consequences for the manager who sold it.
Of course, it happened because they just sold the results of an SQL query. One wonders how much "debt" is equally real.
The whole story lies in the balance of whatever the hell " Transactions made using the test accounts weren’t ever processed as real orders. " means , and how the customer not surprisingly interpreted them as real.
Our sysadmin has a fanatical aversion to "accounts that arnt real people"
Machine accounts have to be rigorously documented and applied for with lots of TLA forms that amount to "massive deal"
A test account acting like a person has little to no chance of surviving the purge.
This can make testing some things rather tricky .
Time to hire 20 casual workers named Andrea Nelly Other for a very important contract.
IIRC payments providers like Stripe allow devs to use credit card numbers reserved specifically for test transactions. I do wonder if some wag has ever printed a card up with such details, and what the results might have been.
Test credit cards
All card providers have these for payent system testing including, I suspect, trapping & rejecting them for payment at real POS terminals.
See https://developers.bluesnap.com/reference/test-credit-cards
Bats? Aren't they properly called LART?
Whilst not quite debt collector level, we once had a TV Licensing demand turn up at our office. We're a major UK television broadcaster (with 3 letters in our name). A manager sent it on to our legal department to deal with. I'd have just ignored it to see what happened next.
> That little fact meant that the tech team's amusement turned to fear that burly chaps carrying baseball bats
So he should have been called Babe Rufus...