I was the service manager at Markline from 1980-1984, servicing desktop and portable calculators and dictation equipment and IBM Wheelwriters.
Hello Bill Hanson!

They not only sold electronics, but we created an internal software system with the programmers to become one of the more sophisticated systems in mail order. Among its features was a fraud prevention system that I created and implemented which allowed a daily exception report to allow us to prevent shipping over 99.9 % of fraudulent attempts.

We put this system on the market with a few sales people and sold it to quite a few places, like The Company Store, and eventually The Sharper Image. From what I heard from legitimate cardholders in conversations, LL Bean and Sharper Image were getting clobbered with fraud, and Sharper Image bought our system, then stole 2 people away from us.

We Also did fulfillment programs for Hormel, The Bear Necessities, The Smithsonian Institute, and about a few dozen other large businesses. TRW also came down to look at what we had. The Secret Service came once a year to borrow a copy of my “fraud list” in which I accumulated several thousand nationwide addresses from Coast to Coast, and they made quite a few arrests.

Those were truly the good old days.