Following Other Credit Cards, Visa Will Also Stop Requiring Signatures (siliconbeat.com)

An anonymous reader quotes SiliconBeat: Visa, the largest U.S. credit card issuer, became the last of the major credit card companies to announce its plan to make signatures optional... Visa joined American Express, Discover, and Mastercard in the phase-out. Mastercard was the first one to announce the move in October, and American Express and Discover followed suit in December... However, this change does not apply to every credit card in circulation; older credit cards without EMV chips will still require signatures for authentication... Since 2011, Visa has deployed more than 460 million EMV chip cards and EMV chip-enabled readers at more than 2.5 million locations.
"Businesses that accepted EMV cards reported a 66 percent decline in fraud in the first two years of EMV deployment," the article notes -- suggesting a future where fewer shoppers are signing their receipts.

"In Canada, Australia and most of Europe, credit cards have long abandoned the signature for the EMV chip and a PIN to authenticate the transaction, like one does with a debit card."

Comments

Re: Turn on your damn chip reader

[stephanruby]

The chip readers work differently in the US. Before the transaction is authorized, the amount is verified through a centralized database. Plus all the handshake protocols are done synchronously and no information is allowed to be cached.

This is why the chip readers in the US at times seem to be taking forever to process transactions and the chip readers in Europe are actually quicker than their European magnetic strip reader counterparts.

So in the US, I really doubt that it's the chip readers are even broken. It is more likely that a store owner decided not to use that feature until the business could switch to a more reliable and blazing fast internet connection, or until the business could get more cashier staff to deal with the extra wait time and queue time this created during peak business rush hours.

Re:Signing is for your protection, not the bank's

[Solandri]

You've got it backwards. If the customer initiates a chargeback, the credit card company assumes the customer is telling the truth. It's not up to the customer to prove the charge was fraudulent. It's up to the merchant to prove the charge was legit. And the easiest way for a merchant to do that is to send the credit card processor a copy of the signature on the receipt. If the receipt matches the customer's signature on file, case closed - it's not fraud. (If the signature doesn't match or there is no signature, the credit card company may or may not decline the chargeback. Merchants can submit other info - address, phone number, etc. - that are not on the card but which the card issuer has on file. That's why gas station pumps ask you to type in your zip code when you use a credit card. But in my experience as a retail business, any customer chargeback where we weren't able to produce a signed receipt or if the signature was faint or illegible, we automatically lost.)

Merchants want to get rid of signatures because it's what the credit card companies use to shift the cost of fraud onto the merchants. Think about it. There are two possible ways for credit card fraud to happen. Either you gave away/lost your card, or the credit card processor allowed a charge that it shouldn't have. The merchant has no way of knowing if a card is fraudulent. All they see is a card, stick it into the reader, and the machine tells them the transaction was approved or declined. The credit card companies got laws passed which prohibit merchants even from requiring ID before they have to accept a card. They can ask for ID, but it's illegal to refuse a credit card transaction just because the customer doesn't have or doesn't want to show ID. But somehow the credit card companies have managed to make the party which has no control over fraud (merchants) pay for fraud. (The exorbitant interest fees you pay credit card companies pay for delinquent customers, not fraud.)

This is why the state of credit card security is so deplorable. Online banking is very secure. Online bill pay is very secure. Wire transfers are very secure. But credit cards security sucks because the parties which can do something about security (the credit card companies and processors) aren't the ones paying for fraud. So they've had little to no incentive to improve credit card security for decades because it hasn't cost them a dime. The merchants have been paying for all the fraud. And whatever the merchant pays for, you pay for via higher prices.

Chip & PIN has its problems, but it's still much more secure than Chip & Sign. And problems with the current Chip & PIN implementation can easily be fixed without altering the process (just need to modify the algorithm the chip uses).

Re: Turn on your damn chip reader

[zifn4b]

I have an EMV MasterCard. Used it today, in fact, and was asked to sign. I don't think I have a PIN for the card.

You really don't seem to understand how credit/debit cards work. Unless you're getting a cash advance, credit transactions never require a PIN. Hence, why they all used to require a signature. That way if the cardholder disputed the charge, the merchant could represent the signature to the cardholder and say "is this your signature?" Debit cards, on the other hand, always require PIN's because it's a completely different type of network with different operating regulations. Visa/MasterCard use variants of the ISO 8583 specification whereas Cirrus/STAR/etc. use something completely different. And, by the way, if you have a debit card from a financial institution that is Visa or MasterCard this is why they tell you to always run it as credit. If you run it as credit, the merchant pays the interchange fees. If you run it as debit, the issuer does and in many cases passes the cost along to the cardholder.