I’ve had 6 bank cards and probably 9 or 10 credit cards with chips and never had a problem. Europe has used the technology longer than Canada. The same chip tech has been used in phone cards for at least 15 years in Mexico, Central and South America with great success.
When I was a cashier I remember thinking it was ridiculous that I, a lowly wage employee, was somehow responsible for catching potential fraud by checking that credit card signatures matched… It’s not like I was on the hook for any bad sales, but they still drilled it into my head that you always gotta check! I think most stores didn’t give a shit, so it was always an issue when I had to decline a card because it was their husband’s or whatever… People were so irritated by that.
Still, the biggest piece of fraud that ever happened at the store was a bad check the the manager himself accepted! Throughout the transaction he talked about how some lady had been passing bad checks, not realizing that he was talking to the very lady. Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was to roast in the depths of a Sloar that day I can tell you.
Oh, we had to wait until C&P was hacked, and no more secure than a magstripe, before we switched to a system that consumes more of everybody’s time than the magstripe does. We didn’t want to make the switch while it was still secure, and actually worth the extra time, after all! Then we’d be no better than you communard Canucks, may as well start curling and drinking skunky beer.
Seriously, they don’t verify them anyway, so why require them?
They don’t require a card number that claims to have a chip to actually have one, that is used, so why require them?
They don’t require the card even be scanned, the cashier can write down the info and enter it manually, so they don’t even have to fake a CC with valid magstripe.
The year “chip” cards became required, I had to replace one card four times. The banks issue new cards in sequential order, so the 8 digit unique part of the number is very easy to guess after a breach. Use a card at a gas pump? You might was well cut it in half after getting it back.
The US is going chip-only, not chip and pin.
Credit card fraud is small compared to the cost of adding PIN:
https://usa.visa.com/visa-everywhere/security/the-cost-of-pin.html
As opposed to the love-in-a-canoe stuff you’ve got going now?
My fifteen-year-old daughter has decided that her initials are good enough for her signature.
Because email is super insecure.
Do you really want a copy of your entire mortgage with all your personal information sitting on Yahoo, your ISP, or some other mail server? Just waiting for someone to get access to.
Fax at least is a point to point secure communication. Or, at least as secure as a phone call.
They could do it with a secure email site too. Which isn’t really email at all, but a web application provided by the vendor where you login to the site, create a message, and send it, all without anything ever leaving the vendor’s application control.
Even better, while it’s a fax transmission, there’s probably never any paper involved anywhere in the process. It’s almost a guarantee the fax is received and sent directly into an application electronically without ever being printed, just as images now instead of it’s original format. On the sending side, just as likely that it was a “print to fax” where the output was sent directly out as fax without ever printing it first. Super slow compared to uploading a document to a secure site, but also completely eliminates incompatibilities between systems and formats. The big downside is that it’s all images now instead of actual text and the resolution limited to fax standards. Just for fun, some are probably processed with OCR to create text that can be indexed, searched, or automatically filled into other things.
Because email is super insecure
Although, entirely unnecessarily so. If every email provider just implemented DKIM and SPF (which is, at this point, utterly trivial to do) and enforced SMTP STARTTLS at the MTAs (again, utterly trivial) email would be more secure than snail mail by many orders of magnitude, and spam and whole categories of malware would disappear overnight.
Don’t hold your breath.
Healthcare services too, at least here in Canada. Drives me crazy.
I don’t know about Canada, but in the U.S. some clinical transactions are required to take place via fax where you can verify the recipient is physically at the receiving fax machine and you must verify that they have received it.
Do you really want a copy of your entire mortgage with all your personal information sitting on Yahoo, your ISP, or some other mail server? Just waiting for someone to get access to.
Fax at least is a point to point secure communication. Or, at least as secure as a phone call.
Even better, while it’s a fax transmission, there’s probably never any paper involved anywhere in the process. It’s almost a guarantee the fax is received and sent directly into an application electronically without ever being printed, just as images now instead of it’s original format. On the sending side, just as likely that it was a “print to fax” where the output was sent directly out as fax without ever printing it first. Super slow compared to uploading a document to a secure site, but also completely eliminates incompatibilities between systems and formats. The big downside is that it’s all images now instead of actual text and the resolution limited to fax standards. Just for fun, some are probably processed with OCR to create text that can be indexed, searched, or automatically filled into other things.
Nope, I worked in healthcare in security management; I was always getting patient information printing out from the security dept. fax machine. Sometimes repeatedly from the same doctor’s office somewhere across the province despite phoning them and telling them they had the wrong fax #. Every week, sometimes every day.
Hey, hey, HEY! Whose beer you callin’ skunky? As compared to … Coors Light? Water has a skuinky flavour compared to that…
I used to write “Check ID” in block letters on my Visa.
The one time someone actually checked, they tried to force me to put a proper signature on the card because that was required. I told them it was my signature.
You know what they did next? That’s right, they asked for my ID to prove that was my signature.
It wasn’t, but I had signed the receipt with my correct signature - which matched my ID - and they still didn’t want to let me pay with the visa because it wasn’t my actual sig on the card.
face palm
People in line got upset with me for the delay but I just cannot stand this kind of stupidity. I ended up talking with the manager who “let me get away with it this time.” I never returned to that store again.
Most merchants I know have disabled the chip reader and gone full swipe because it takes longer, and is confusing. Not to mention every goddamn terminal requires different behaviors.
Probably because some merchants cannot afford the more expensive terminals.
Here in Canada, the merchants who don’t yet have tappable terminals have explained to me that it’s because they get charged more for upgrading to the tappable terminals. Which boggles my brain until I remember that the idiots in charge of this kind of thing are banks.
Healthcare services too, at least here in Canada. Drives me crazy.
In the year 3018 physicians everywhere will still be using faxes.
The lack of a PIN requirement makes all those chip cards pointless. I was in the UK recently, where they bring the portable card reader to you rather than spirit your card away to parts unknown. What an idea! The waiter was a little flummoxed when the machine spit out a receipt asking for a signature, though.
Blockquote
They already don’t need a signature. I got thrown out of a bar back in the 1980s and they had no problem processing my credit card.
There are specific rules regarding this. They can process the card without the signature, but (to the best of my knowledge) can’t process a tip without a signature.
Which makes me wonder if this new change will have an effect on tip fraud?
I thought it had to do whether the total was > $25, but even that seems to be fluid.