Not exactly. Some people are in the business of gathering and selling valid credit cards.

They won't cash out on them or buy items. Instead, they'll collect cards from a source (skimming, hacking, whatever), validate them by adding them to a website that does an authorization (those $1 checks that never get committed). They can then sell them wholesale for a premium compared to non-verified cards.

> How do you validate the card is live? Run a real transaction through it and mark it based on the result.

Not necessarily. Some online services, particularly shops that do home delivery, may give their customers the possibility of adding a card to their wallet and perform a verification as part of the process. As a result, it becomes possible to validate a stolen card number without performing an actual transaction.

My bank called as they had red flagged a suspicious charge on on my credit card. The sum was $0. The bank rep told me that this often flies under the radar and doesn't show up in some records and it indeed did not show up in my transaction history that i could see online in my banking details. But yeah the point was exactly the same. The fraudsters testing whether the charge goes through and the card is alive/valid.

If you're trying to fight financial crime it's important to not simplify behavior seen in the wild. Like the other commented noted, there is a very clear difference in behaviour between those validating cards and those using cards in order to steal.