Like the other post said, I assume they were manually sending the information to their merchant bank so there was a significant delay between when your account

Like the other post said, I assume they were manually sending the information to their merchant bank so there was a significant delay between when your account was created and when they discovered it wasn't real. Additionally, at this time credit cards didn't have the 3 digit security code they have today so generating a 'valid' number was trivial.