OT Has anyone in the group ever had to verify your signature on a credit card receipt?

It's not for your protection that the merchant violates the agreement they signed. It is for their protection as fraudulent use of a card does not cost the legitimate holder a dime. I refuse all requests for DL or other ID. I have challenged Wal-Mart thru MasterCharge and received an apology from corporate and they no longer request additional ID. Challenged Dobbs Tire and received a written apology from corporate. The best was Lowe's. I challenged them when they demanded DL after purchase was approved by MC. I refused and they withheld merchandise but did not reverse charge. They settled for $4,650.00. The disputed charge was $27.54. How many times have you seen the merchant compare the card sig with the charge sig? That is required by the agreement but is almost universally ignored. If the card is not signed, it is considered invalid and the merchant must require that the card by signed in their presence before acceptance. Another consumer fallacy is marking "See ID" on the card. That makes the card invalid as it has been altered. I learned quite a bit about the proper acceptance of CC's during the negotiations w/Lowe's attorneys.

Reply to
Usafretcol
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The counter argument is that the clerk now has more information about you (address, DoB, DL#), making it easier for him to steal your identity.

Reply to
krw

Good job! I sincerely hope that I didn't cause you any discomfort by my response. I see lots of things that we all do and take for granted that just aren't right. I am such a safety freak (my wife's best friend is a safety engineer who makes me look casual about safety) that not only will I not use cards at restaurants, but I also jot down the first few digits of a $100 bill's serial number on a napkin before handing the cash to a waiter.

My poor departed grandmother got scammed by a clerk taking her twenty dollar bill, walking in in the back with it, and coming back and claiming it was a counterfeit. It wasn't and they were unloading one they took in on her because she was old, frail and spoke English with an accent. I tell that story to my dining companions and write the serial number fragment down so that if the waiter comes back with a counterfeit bill, I can make a very strong case right then and there that a switch was made. So far, so good. I've only been scammed once at a Thai restaurant that gave me foreign coins in change so now I even look at that closely.

My knowledge about the Mastercard/VISA rules is rusty at best, but I knew that walking away with your card and license is just not allowed, especially now that both card companies are being plagued with skimmers and other forms of ID theft.

I know that in Europe, they bring an imprinter or an electronic reader to your table so that your card never leaves your view - at least in almost all the places I dined at. Many of the credit cards there also have an RF chip that makes skimming quite a bit harder. I assume from that experience that's also your right in America, but honestly, that's something I am not sure about and it seems that you'll be finding out about.

One good reason, beyond the ID theft threat, not to hand over your ID is that it often gets mixed up and people get the wrong cards back, sometimes too late to do anything about it immediately because the other patrons have already left with YOUR card.

I've known too many waiters to trust them with a burned out match, let alone something of value to me.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

One of the reasons that the credit card issuers forbid the asking of additional ID by the user is that most requests are for a driver's license. Many DL's carry SS#'s, DOB, and address. These are prime items for identity theft and fraud. Since 1969 (my 1st CC) I have never been asked for ID and I have made charges from about $10 to one for $22,000. If you are asked for additional ID you are being asked to participate in breaching a civil agreement between the merchant and the CC issuer. You could be giving your CC issuer a means to challenge a fraud claim.

Reply to
Thomas Edward

Walking away with both? I can't think of a time when the wait staff did not have to walk away to run the card in the US.

RFID readers exist that lets a Nefarious Person walk past you with a reader and essentially pick your pocket.

Haven't had that happen except with my best friend. We happen to both CCs from the same company. Of course, most of that is probably on us after the cards come back (g).

Reply to
Kurt Ullman

I believe that if you ask, they MUST bring an imprinter to the table but I haven't had a chance to call VISA and confirm it. After all, they tell you that you shouldn't let anyone else use your card. To then force you to put it in the hands of a stranger seems a bit contrary to that advice. It's a matter of convenience for restaurant merchants and the epidemic of restaurant card skimming sweeping the nation could easily put an end to the "convenience" of having a waiter you've never seen before disappear with your card for five or ten minutes.

Only off unencrypted chips. Again it's the CC companies not wanting to scare merchants off by requiring them to invest in expensive and safer equipment that's driving the train in the US, AFAIK. The data capacity of a chipped CC is far greater than the mag stripe technology and much harder to skim. But I will agree that there's always someone building a taller ladder.

Back in the early 80's NSA instituted a card system that allowed people to access various secured areas based on the RFID chips. Sov spies sat outside in the parking lot with hi-tech skimmers that could read the codes well enough to determine who the big-wigs were. It was quickly abandoned.

So were the furnaces that burned the copious classified papers that accumulated daily when a furnace exploded and blew almost a ton of unburned classified data into the air at Ft. Meade. The fort's soldiers were kept very busy for the next few days scouring the nearby woods for TS docs. They switched to a shredding/slurry process that makes the classified waste into a sort of paper mache that's then dried AND burned. It's hard to reconstitute shredded goo. Details are in the book "The Puzzle Palace."

If *you've* had it happen once, you can pretty much bet it's happened to other people. I got scammed once at the now defunct Hechingers. I was tired, it was near closing and the clerk made a mistake (I think deliberately) on the receipt. In the ensuing hubbub I forgot to get the card back and it was used within an hour after leaving the store by the thief. Fortunately I realized that it was missing when I went to charge some gasoline for the trip home.

After that I thought about buying an electronic wallet that beeps if you put it away without the missing credit card, but after than experience, I pretty much stopped using them except for places where it's almost impossible not to, like booking hotels and air flights. Now that the TSA has made flying a torture, I only use them to book hotels. I may yet have to buy that wallet as I become more and more forgetful. )-:

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

I'm asked for additional id on a regular basis.

Correct with Visa and MasterCard. And I usually decline a request for additional id.

However, if you use other credit card types (like American Express) the merchant may be permitted to require additional identification.

Reply to
Malcolm Hoar

If a waiter did ask me for both CC and license I might ask my dining companion to help me follow him at a distance to see where he went and what he did with the card and the license so that I could have a witness to my citizen's arrest if I saw the waiter photographing my license with a cellphone cam. There is no GOOD reason to take the license away. You can

*perhaps* use it to compare the signature with the signed receipt *at the table* but walking out of sight with it is, in my mind, a sure sign of something very rotten.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

Kurt said he only used bank ATMs because others were easy to tamper with. I replied that I never used bank ATMs because they were too expensive. The implication was that I used ATMs but not those owned/operated by banks.

Reply to
krw

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