You can buy the cards at retail with no ID at all. When you get home, you need to activate the card online. To do that all you need is a valid DOB/SSN/address/name combination (checked against credit header file info). They only ask for copies of ID's etc. if their online activation system can't automatically verify the info through the credit bureaus. Fortunately, full profiles with this info are available on the cheap on Russian hacker forums (less than $5 per record). They do send a permanent card in the mail about 10 days after activation, but the temporary one bought in the store and activated online is all you need to take cash from ATM's. By the time the permanent card arrived at the address you used to activate it, you would have long been done using the account.
Wow, seems pretty fool-proof then. Always thought even if you could grab a Paypal account, the damage you could do would be pretty limited due to reversible transactions, payout to the user's bank account only, limited ways to buy high value online goods instantly etc.
I wonder how successful their card program is and what percentage of their fraud is generated by it. We're seeing businesses massively shift away from cash, as are governments. But I also thought the same was happening with cards to a smaller extent. Wouldn't have expected a physical-card push from a digital money company like Paypal. I guess cards (physical or stored as digital credentials like Appe Pay) are here to stay for quite some time.
