Most terminals require signatures directly on the terminal with the fake pen. That’s at some department stores, grocery stores, all kinds of places. IME, the high end the place, the more often they’ll require your signature. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Mastercard's Plans to Fully Eliminate Signature Requirement Next Year Will Speed Up Apple Pay
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United Kingdom did away with signatures in the '90's and went with chip and PIN cards; just saying....Thank Goodness. Finally.
What blows my mind is that the US still has no tap to pay yet they got Apple Pay. Nothing easier than tapping your credit card on the terminal for a split second
Yes, this.. I refuse to show ID when I buy anything with a credit card. It does NOTHING to increase security for either me OR the store.
Seriously, what do they think will happen if I call the CC company and say it wasn't authorized. Do they really think that saying that their minimum wage earning employee "visually checked" some ID I showed them, from the proud state of Nowhereland, is going to cause Visa to say, "Oh, well, then that's obviously good enough for us!"
Plus, now I've shown my drivers license with license number to some minimum wage earning employee who can memorize the information for later use.
It's just a terrible idea, all around.
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I actually have taken to writing, "Not Authorized" as my signature. I've *never* been questioned.
This is true if a place just takes NFC but doesn't specifically support Apple Pay. Then Apple Pay transactions are treated as regular NFC and have upper limit of CA$100. But if a store specifically supports Apple Pay then there is no limit. However, such stores seem to be very few. I think the only time I was able to use Apple Pay for something over CA$100 was at an Apple Store. And even the Apple sales guy was surprised and tried to tell me it won't work over $100. It did work but it means people very rarely use it even at Apple Stores.
The signature requirement is already very uncommon in Canada, where chip-and-PIN cards are the norm. At most merchants in Canada, customers insert a card into the payment terminal, enter a PIN, and the purchase is completed.
Mastercard removing the signature requirement won't speed up Apple Pay in Canada, however, as contactless payments aren't generally permitted for purchases above $100. Above this limit, customers must use chip-and-PIN.
1. Don't knock minimum-wage earners, we all start somewhere.
2. Where do you shop where Rain-Man is the cashier-- memorizing your driver's license # within a 5 second glance??
I haven't signed the back of a credit card for decades, and can't recall ever having a transaction not accepted. None of the highly trained graphologists running the cash registers looks, nor should they. All of my signatures, especially for the biometrically-verified transactions, get an illegible protest doodle from me. Nobody questions that either.
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No, it's the U.S. banks who resist chip and PIN. Not sure why, but I think it puts more onus on the banks to guarantee the transition and prevent fraud.
I suspect a lot of people really had difficulty with not signing for anything, even with Apple Pay. A lot of Clover-using places that I've been to used to support CDCVM but ended up getting rid of it and making people sign instead.
That's basically what it was before most of the time. The only difference now is that you don't have to sign for expensive purchases either.
It's very unlikely that the US will ever transition from chip and signature to chip and PIN. If anything, our cards might end up getting contactless support at some point--but even then, contactless cards are seen as highly insecure by enough people such that without a sustained marketing effort they might not get anywhere.
Speaking of this, check out the link in my signature.
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They felt that it wasn't worth the additional cost/effort to do so. Note the lost/stolen numbers on this infographic.
It is well past time for card signing to die a quick death.
I worked at Eddie Bauer for a few years in the late 1980’s; even then it was corporate policy not to force a customer to sign a card or present identification.
I haven’t signed a card for 25 years, instead I write “Ask For Identification”; why, if I lose a card, would I want to give a free example of my signature along with it?
I worked at Eddie Bauer for a few years in the late 1980’s; even then it was corporate policy not to force a customer to sign a card or present identification.
I haven’t signed a card for 25 years, instead I write “Ask For Identification”; why, if I lose a card, would I want to give a free example of my signature along with it?
Did you really just say that?
If you do not sign, it does not matter. I have not signed one in many years.
Somebody else could easily sign if they wanted to anyways.
Signing or not signing the card, or the sales slip provides about a 1% security measure. Nobody looks. I have been scribbling a signature for years and laugh when people sign their full name very carefully. That signature means just about nothing on the card, or the slip, or the terminal.
I don't see anything like that in your link. It doesn't mention either PIN or signature. I believe the actual reason why the banks prefer to stick with the signature requirement it pushes some responsibility for fraudulent purchases back onto the retailers. If the retailers are freed from any responsibility to verify the card holder (theoretical though it may be) then they are also released from responsibility for preventing fraudulent card use.
I can tell you that shop clerks in Australia actually look. Ask me how I know.
In Australia they do. Was one of the things that blew my mind when I moved to Canada. In North America nobody looks.
It's because in Australia the store is responsible for the fraud if the signature does not match. In North America the credit card company is. Guess where the stores carefully train their employees in security practices?
The other thing that blew my mind is restaurants where they take the card away from you to swipe it through a machine. Um... what!!!!
That doesn't sound very secure at all. With Apple Pay you need to TouchID to authenticate yourself for it to go through. If you can just tap your card on the terminal, that means someone could discreetly tap a reader to your wallet through your pants and charge your card. No thanks.
I should have clarified. "Lost/stolen" fraud (which PIN would protect against) is only 9% of all card fraud in the US, vs 45 + 38 + 8 = 91% for all other fraud types combined. Considering that they'd likely have to build significant additional infrastructure to support PIN only to help with 9% of fraud, they probably concluded it wasn't worth the effort--especially since customers can already deactivate their lost/stolen cards via mobile app/website or a quick phone call.
Also, merchant liability doesn't change based on signature/PIN per the current card network rules--except if the merchant terminal doesn't support PIN and the card is set to prefer it in the case of MC/AmEx/Discover. Very few banks have taken advantage of this, however, so they have the liability if the merchant supports the chip. Of course, merchants who complain that they're constantly losing chargebacks due to "fraud" likely aren't following the signature verification rules in the first place.
I can't comment on Australian law but see above. Assuming that the rules are similar there too and there's no law overriding them, I'd expect the same stuff to happen there too.
BTW, the one downside of chip and signature is that we'll likely never get pay at the table--or even pay at the front--in any significant capacity. (The chain restaurants that have installed Ziosk and similar mostly didn't do so for pay at the table. That is also potentially a significant hardware investment which some/most restaurants may balk at; heck, even the standard wireless terminals used in Europe are a hard sell since PIN isn't required.)
I can tell you that shop clerks in Australia actually look. Ask me how I know.
Lol. Ok. How do you know?
Before the switch I remember having to resign a couple of times because the checkout chick/dude thought it didn’t match. So it’s true, in Australia they checked.
Now I wonder why they still have a signature space on the card when nobody needs to sign it.
I normally just scribble something. Turns out that didn't work when I went to Australia on a business trip a few years ago and the guy made me sign again.
This probably won't be too much of an issue anymore if I ever go back, however, because I'll likely use AP everywhere instead.
its limited to 30€ transactions and signing or swiping seems by far less secure to me plus i can see every transaction immediately on my app and if there is anything unusual i can still cnacel that transaction within 3-7 days
Banks have no control over who is using your phone's passcode, which is also all that is needed to register a finger. So they have no way of knowing or proving that it was you doing the transaction.
OTOH, a signature or PIN at least can be somewhat tied back as your responsibility.
Fingerprint readers are easy to fool. But they're considered "secure enough" for this case because few criminals would go to the trouble.
That does nothing except make it possible for a merchant to refuse you. Your card contract says the card is not valid until it's signed.