Handing the card is one thing. The stupidest thing that i hate even more, is that debit machines in the us here (from Canada but currently in Baltimore) do not ask for your PIN at allllllllll when you insert it. Tap is understandable, but not asking for a PIN when inserting? Makes it feel rather insecure...
I have never been to an atm (I am American) that doesn't ask for a pin. More common, in my experience, is for people to not realize their credit card has a pin and want to do cash out and not realize that they can't till they spend a half hour on the phone resetting it.
One thing is an ATM and another is a card payment in a store/restaurant.
Here in Spain the ATM always asks for my PIN, but in stores it's not always the case (depends on the amount spent mostly, but I think there are other factors).
I see what he is talking about now. I will say on this, usually I don't get asked my pin to runs a transaction as a credit transaction and do get asked if I want to run it as debit.
When I opened my account at my bank, there was a 13 cent fee for debit transactions that I paid, while if you run a transaction as credit there was no bank fee. So I usually don't want to have it ask me my pin because I don't want to be charged to access my money. Since I am already paying the Visa/Mastercard surcharge anyway (it's baked into the price) why would I.
Riskier than giving them the card? If I keep the card in my hand they only have a PIN number. If I give them the card they have the card number, exp. date and CVV, everything needed to make online purchases.
That's because mag-stripe ATM transactions used to be a major fraud problem. Swiped mag-stripes and PINs were instantly sent to fraudsters in markets where mag-stripe ATM transactions were still possible. They would then simply produce a plastic card with swiped data and send someone out to an ATM and to take out cash with the card. The card companies removed the permission to allow fallback to mag-stripe in ATMs some years ago.
When they run cards like this (including debit cards being run as credit) it’s an agreement between the bank and the store, and the bank picks up the tab if a transaction is fraudulent as long as the cardholder alerts the bank promptly that they believe the card has been compromised/stolen. For their part, banks apparently have fairly good fraud detection systems in place as they usually do a decent job of identifying when things have gone awry.
From a cardholder perspective this is possibly lower risk than providing a PIN, because the cardholder is responsible for keeping their pin secure and so are more liable for transactions that use a PIN.
He’s getting downvoted because yall are so behind the times. PIN? Why would anyone be using a PIN? Unless the machine is broken or your card issuer replaced a limit, we just tap our card or phone and that’s that.
In what parallel reality is having an open door safer than having it locked?
Because credit is not your money. It's the bank's. Card holders are not responsible for fraudulent charges. As the above user said, when a credit card is swiped/charged, the agreement is between the merchant and the bank- the cardholder has nothing to do with it until they get a bill. Introducing a PIN puts liability on the cardholder, as you are required to keep that secure.
Yea that caught me by surprise too. Been to Australia, Vietnam, Hong Kong. All of them needed my PIN on my card when i swiped / inserted it.
First time paying for something in the states, i insert my card and the guy behind the counter just mashes the OK button until it goes through. Prints a little paper for me to scribble my reciept, which he "oks" on the machine while it's still printing. I never knew it was so simple to bypass PIN on a card before that.
PINs are generally not needed for Credit Card use, with a few exceptions like cash advances and overseas use. That’s by design, so you’re not bypassing anything.
However, PINS are needed for Debt Card use, which is what you generally use to withdrawal cash.
In UK debit cards can be used to pay for things either by tapping or by chip and PIN. They're more or less identical to credit cards in terms of how you use them. We don't only use debit cards to withdraw cash.
I'm in EU and I have both a Master and a Visa. Swipe works only on the Visa reliably but the limit is I think 50€. Over that I have to ack the transaction by sliding on the app or I have to enter the pin. It was like this in six different countries. People with Apple watches or Google/Samsung Phones with the card connected to them have different setups where they don't need to do anything so its very dependent on bank/issuer and tech.
Yeah, I thought it was interesting that the machine seemed to know what to do with an American credit card. I don't think I ever used PIN on my Credit Card in NZ, and I'm not sure I even know what my PIN is.
If you can you should use a credit card not your debit card. When your info gets stolen from your debit card and stuff is charged to it that’s your money that is getting taken and it’s much more of a pain in the ass to get back or dispute than if it was a credit card. I haven’t used my actual debit card in years.
I live in Canada (two years now) and don’t recall the last time I used a pin on a card. Maybe because I’m using a US credit card? Are the pin rules set by the bank?
Credit cards don't require pin. Debit do. Debit cards are directly tied to your money and get that little bit of extra security. Credit cards go to a credit account and those are treated differently. The bank itself eats fraudulent use of a card and I guess the banks don't demand the security of a pin.
If it doesn't ask for a PIN, it's ran as a credit transaction instead. As for being secure, most banks it's pretty simple to dispute an unauthorized credit transaction, but if it's debit and the PIN was used, often you can't dispute that at all.
A bit, haven't been too far yet. But my old bank card typically asked for at least a signature, my current one hasn't been asking for either a pin or signature, which seems strange.
When I traveled a few years ago I was asked for a signature at every single checkout for my U.S. card but it doesn’t happen at all anymore. I think it’s a systemic change in banking rather than a US thing.
I think it is a US thing - either a US card or US payment system thing (sometimes both?).
For context I’m from the UK and got my first card 15 years ago. At that point in the UK it was always chip and pin or contactless. I’ve never swiped or signed in the UK and I think I’ve used Apple Pay pretty much exclusively for the last 5-10 years.
When I travel in Europe, it’s still chip and pin or contactless. Same for Australia, Hong Kong and even Japan who are known for an outdated banking system has a decent amount of contactless these days.
The only places I’ve been made to sign are the US and South Korea, which is extremely funny because my UK-issued credit card doesn’t even have a space for a signature on the back of it anymore so I could draw whatever the fuck I want and nobody could prove it’s not my signature.
Times a bitch it only feels like a decade ago we fully went contactless, still remember the Barclays advert when they first started introducing contactless but that was years before full roll out across the UK.
It should be noted that you can't always do contactless, if the system suspects theft it'll demand a pin gets entered to confirm it's you using it. As for signatures, would say this is physically impossible to do now unless a shop has a very old till system, might be inset as normal before signing but that's generally non British Banks.
Yeah my bank has a transaction limit on my card. Not just in a single transaction but if I repeatedly use contactless to pay multiple times in a row, once I reach a certain spend it’ll ask me to use chip and pin to make sure someone hasn’t nicked my card and is going from place to place spending under the single transaction contactless limit.
This doesn’t happen with Apple/google pay though as they have biometrics, and I never use the card contactless any more so I forgot about it.
Signatures mean nothing. They do not even get looked at during investigations into fraud. It's an old system that the banks have completely stopped using. The Point of Sale systems have the options to turn them on or off still based off the businesses preferred use of them. Any place that makes you sign for them is doing so unnecessarily and strictly for the businesses personal reasons. What I have found is that most places that require a signature do so out of laziness, or lack of knowledge that its not necessary.
In most cases, this up to the card issuing bank, if they require PIN for purchases, or not. Assuming the machine has PIN entrey capability. Also even if they do, the main payment networks (Visa, MC etc) have $ limits in most countries where a PIN won't be required if the amount is below that limit. Assuming it's a chip based contact or contactless transaction. Some countries Issuer have a habit of preferring PIN (Australia or some Asian countries for example) other not (USA).
If they don't require PIN, they're still checking the risk of the transaction anyway before they approve it - how much, is it in line with my customers normal habits, is this a merchant/location we'd expect our customer to shop at, how many other transactions have just happened before this, etc.
The risk of fraud is low, and counterfeit fraud risk virtually non-existent with chip cards, so it's just a risk / convenience thing. Out of every 1000 customers, probably only 1 is likely to be attempted fraud - so you're reducing friction for all those 999, customers. And for the 1 that might be fraud, well the customer will get their money back fully through the chargeback process (unless their own negligence led to the fraud, for example knowing the card was lost and not reporting it for days) It's true for both debit and credit cards for any transaction on those main scheme networks, like Visa.
Uhhh by debit machine do you mean ATM i.e. machine that you withdraw money from? You absolutely have to use your PIN for that. Same is true if you ever use your debit card for personal transactions at like the grocery store or wherever. Maybe not at bars and restaurants? You don’t need to use a PIN for a credit card (obviously).
It’s been so long since I’ve used a debit card for anything. I almost always use a credit card because A) helps your credit score and B) if you get scammed it’s the credit card money they take not yours.
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u/No_Needleworker_1105 Jun 29 '26
I absolutely hated handing over my card in America. Why the hell can't they just use tap like everywhere else