That’s all very interesting … but does that mean that basic physical possession of a credit card equates to being able to effectivley use it?
Well, yeah, I guess. That’s actually the rule now, given that most (live) merchants don’t actually pay much attention to signatures. If the banks / merchants are willing to live with that, I guess we consumers will have to go along.
Credit Card Signatures Are About to Become Extinct in the U.S.
The major credit card networks are ending a requirement that people sign for most card transactions — the latest blow to the signature.
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Signatures have seemed pretty optional in the USA for a while. They bring my credit card slip back to the table and if I don't sign it they'll still be billing me – everywhere else they hang around and wait for me to do that.
For online and telephone transactions, a signature has not been required for a long time if it ever was, so I don’t think this is as big a deal as one might think. The thing that’s interesting to me is the degree to which fraud can be prevented by recognizing fraudulent purchases using some kind of AI software. So if you want to make a purchase that is unusual enough that it would trigger the fraud recognition algorithm, you will need to be able to call the credit card issuer (or receive their call) to allow it to be approved.
So tell me again why we went with chip and sig instead of chip and pin?
Yeah, heard this the other day and my first thought was that the rest of the world has been doing chip and pen for at least a decade so why does it take so long for the US to to adapt to better tech?
+Kee Hinckley Yeah, that thought had occurred to me. The bottom line seems to me to be that credit card fraud is either so infrequent (or so baked into the cost structure of the credit card industry) that the marginal security of signatures (which, as +David Newman noted, are not required on online transactions anyway).
+Stan Pedzick Famously, the US credit card industry was concerned that Americans would be unwilling or unable to memorize a 4-digit number, even though they do that for their debit cards. It's zany.