Iâm afraid of retail stores. All year round. Iâd happily never set foot in one ever again.
And Iâm getting sick of having to get my credit card replaced because of this shit.
I have to get my credit cards replace several times each year because of fraudulent charge attempts. It has never cost me a dime or kept me from buying anything. Recurring charges are annoying because of it, though.
Never use debit cards, banks are much better at fighting on your behalf if they havenât already gotten your money.
On Friday, yet another card arrived in the mail for me from Barclays. This was probably due to the Home Depot breach, although I had not seen any fraudulent charges in my credit card. The letter that proceeded the new card said that this was just a precaution. Like every card before it, I had to call a number and confirm that it was in fact me that received the card and enter a new four digit pin number. I asked my husband why, if the technology is basically broken, do banks continue to use security based on four digit pin passwords? He said because itâs cheap. Ramping up into more sophisticated security will cost the banks more money, more than the hackers are stealing from them.
Also customers get frustrated when asked to memorize longer passwords, much less remember random strings of symbols. Didnât Obama sign a mandate whereby magnetic strip technology would be phased out and be replaced by microchips, like the UK? Whatâs wrong with using fingerprints, when the readers are already built into our smart phones?
Apple Pay is one solution since it doesnât transmit your card number to retailers, and Iâm using it where ever I can, but itâs not taken at a lot places right now. I have a chip and pin card because I travel to Europe a lot, but Iâm seeing a problem with implementation here. The one place here in NYC where I can use the chip has a reader that does not require that I put in a PIN. Totally broken, but Iâm predicting this is what weâll get here in the US. Oh well.
Well, Iâm in the UK, and the microchip solution hasnât made us much safer. Banks simply arenât motivated to proper security-mindedness; theyâre passing most of the low-level fraud costs on to customers and small traders.
(And whatâs wrong with using fingerprints is that fingerprint readers are extremely easy to fool.)
As someone in Canada, with both a chip-and-pin Credit Card and Debit Card, where the magnetic stripe is almost never used, watching this sort of feels like watching a history channel replaying an old documentary.
IIRC the only machine around here still using stripes are probably Translinkâs old machines, which I rarely use since I buy (cheaper) booklets of fares at the store ahead of time.
I make almost 100% of all of my online purchases using bitcoin for exactly this reason. You can to. Refuse to give out your credit card online ever again.
I recently went home to NZ where I found a new chip debit card waiting for me. Oh, âcoolâ I thought, ânew, safer, faster technology!â. Imagine my disappointment to find it slower and slightly stressful and as a result less convenient than the old magnetic strip card that I had just cut up. Not only does the card take longer to read but most of the terminals expect you to leave it in the machine for a good part of the transaction and to wait attentively for the message to remove the card. Until you remove the card the cashier canât complete the transaction.
I eagerly await Apple Pay or something similarly safe and convenient.
Why back in my day, young feller, we had credit cards made out of paper, called âcash.â Back then, if criminals broke into Target and took all the âcash,â it didnât cost me a dime. No sirree.
Can you put a trigger warning on any mention of Bitcoin please? I sold 55 that I mined in the early days for about NZ$200 when I remembered them a year or two later. They would have been worth about NZ$70,000 at one point and even today theyâd get me NZ$26,000. So you know. Punch in the guts.
Yep, I only have a keycard, to get cash out of ATMs. Fuck credit cards; nothing is as convenient or secure as cash (as long as you wear stuff with pockets).
For online thereâs Paypal.
Yeah, I was somewhat bemused when in the last minute they were like âthe banks expect the introduction next year of modern cards that have been internationally standard for the last several years will result in better securityâ - you think?
Breaking news.
Guy that makes a living selling security systems tells us how insecure the existing system is. I would like to hear about this from an expert that doesnât sell solution to this problem and doesnât profit from scaring potential customers into buying this system.
In Europe credit cards are ChipCards and have secret pin code.
Its almost only the USA that still uses magnetic band + signature credit cards.
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